A Letter to the Future

A few weeks ago, a reader of The Morning told me about a project she runs wherein people write letters to their future selves and send them to her. Five years later, she mails the letters back to them. She recently opened her own letter from 2020, written during lockdown, and was struck by how much she and the world had changed.

A transmission across the years from younger you to older you: What would you say? What feels essential to report from this moment in time, about your life and the world? There’s this scene in the 1992 Nora Ephron movie “This Is My Life,” in which Julie Kavner, playing a mother, says goodbye to her young daughters before going on a trip. She gives them journals, encouraging them to take notes instead of writing letters. “Letter writing is ridiculous,” she says. “Nothing ever arrives within a week, and someone else ends up with what you should have: a record of your life.”

I wondered, as I considered writing a letter to future me, why not just keep a journal and look back on what I’ve written five years from now? A letter is different from a journal entry, I reasoned. In a letter, you address another person. You’re making sure your thoughts are legible to them, explaining things that you wouldn’t need to explain to your journal. And a journal — or at least my journal — tends to be an exercise in immediacy, a way of getting down what happened today, what’s on my mind in this instant. In a letter that attempted to capture my experience of being alive right now, I’d pull back, take a wide view and present the situation as more of an offering than a regurgitation. I’d try to convey something essential about who I am, what I believe and hold dear.

I recall an assignment in sixth grade in which we were directed to make a list of 100 things we hoped to accomplish before we graduated high school. Our teacher promised to send them to us when we turned 18. I never received mine and have often wondered what I wrote. (I can only recollect that I put down that I wanted to dance with Patrick Swayze, and I believe I copied that lofty aspiration from my friend Tracy. Neither of us accomplished this.)

I know that I would have feared that me at 18 would find me at 11 babyish. There’s that same type of fear in writing to me five years from now: I want me in 2030 to look back and think my priorities and preoccupations worthwhile. I’m an adult now, and I want to believe that the gist of who I am is to some extent indelible, not so different from who I will be in the future, but there’s a small part of me that hopes that future me is going to be wiser and more evolved, and it makes me almost embarrassed to be me today.

My friend Sara writes a letter to herself every year on her birthday, but she doesn’t open them. I asked her for advice. “I tend to kind of graze over various areas of my life, internal and external,” she said. “Who did I hang out with? Who did I wish I spent more time with? What was my favorite beverage? What smell couldn’t I get enough of? What made me really sad? What lit me up?”