For eighteen years, I’ve written a letter to myself on my birthday. I read the letter the next year, and then write a new one to my future self. Having just finished writing my 19th letter, I’m starting a series of posts in which I revisit and reflect on each letter to date.
In May of 2005, I wrote the first of what would become an annual ritual of writing letters to myself. I wrote this first letter two months after my birthday and instructed myself not to open the sealed envelope until March 9, 2006; my twenty-seventh birthday.
At the time, I was working through Julia Cameron’s book, The Artist’s Way, and preparing for graduate school in Sociology at the University of California, Davis.
I want to be sure that I continue on a path that I want and not one that I feel like I should be on. It’s okay if I decide after one year or two years or even four years that grad school is not where I want to be. In order to be happy, I must do what I want to do.
May 5, 2005
Even then, I felt the pangs of potential conflict between the academic path I’d chosen and my creative writing instincts. Although I’d chosen academia, I gave myself permission to veer onto other paths.
As graduate school progressed, I gradually forgot this life-affirming permission. Instead, the comfort of planned milestones and a clearly structured future forced my desires into a soundproof box.
I must continue to nurture my life outside of school…I need to take 20 to 30 minutes every day for writing. Also, artist dates are very important. They don’t have to be anything elaborate, just one hour a week to myself to nurture my artist child.
May 5, 2005
Despite imploring myself to feed and water the writer-artist within me, I allowed her to wither. During the first few years in grad school, I wrote fiction with a writing group whose support enabled me to draft an entire novel while writing my dissertation. By the time I accepted a tenure-track job, I wrote only occasionally in my journal and no longer considered myself a “real” writer. My academic self had fully overpowered the artist child.
I want to remember these things because I think they are part of my ideal life. Do what I want, not what I think other people want me to do.
May 5, 2005
My writer self eventually resurfaced, first as a whisper and then as a megaphonic shout. Before reading my 2005 letter, I thought the voice had provided a major new insight into who I was always meant to be.
Now, I wonder why it took seventeen years to trust what I’ve known all along. Despite the long trip, I’ve finally circled back to my twenty-six-year-old self.
“I’ll meet you there,” she said all those years ago.
Finally at the trailhead, I reach for her outstretched hand and relax into the permission offered so long ago.
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