Seven years of letters to my next-year self

Every year on my birthday, late at night, I write myself a letter. This year makes seven.

The first one came at the end of a bad stretch. My work had stalled, a relationship had ended, and I had moved apartments three times in twelve months. On the night itself I ate hotpot alone, and on the walk home I wanted badly to talk to someone. I went through my contacts twice and decided that calling any of them would make me ridiculous. At home I found a notebook I had never used and wrote the first letter. The salutation was "To me at twenty-seven."

Reading it now is embarrassing. I hoped for a raise. I hoped to stop being single. I hoped to buy a flat. When I opened it a year later, there was no raise, no partner, no flat. By any reasonable measure the letter was a failure. But near the bottom I found a line that kept me sitting at my desk for a long time.

"I know this year was hard. But remember the steam off that hotpot tonight. You took care of yourself, alone, and you did it well. Whatever next year looks like, don't forget to praise yourself once in a while."

That letter granted me nothing I had asked for, and did something better. It let the version of me from one year earlier put an arm around the version of me one year later.

After that the letter became a fixed ritual, though the method changed. I stopped making lists of wishes and started answering three questions. What are you most grateful to yourself for this year? How did you get through the hardest part? What is one sentence you want to say to next year?

Seven years of this has left me seven letters. Read in sequence they are a novel written for an audience of one. There is the one from the year I quit a job I could not stand in order to study something new; that letter says, in the middle of a paragraph, "I am scared to death, but I want to go." There is the shortest one, written a week after my grandmother died, which is a single sentence: "I miss her today. You are living well too. She knows." There is the one from the pandemic year that ran to three pages, and last year's, which is entirely about my cat and the kalanchoe that finally flowered on the balcony after two years of doing nothing at all.

Time won't run backwards, but words will. A letter is slow mail to yourself, posted to the you who is out there in the future, working alone.

These letters have taught me a few things.

The first is that my memory of myself is unreliable. In recollection I am convinced that these years produced nothing. The letters say otherwise, in ink: learned to swim at thirty-one, read sixty books, went from a person who could not speak in a meeting to one who presents proposals to a room of a hundred. Without that record I would go on convicting myself of a crime I never committed.

The second is that the worst stretches all share one feature. At the time each one felt impassable. In the letters, afterwards, each takes four or five lines. Time is on the side of the person holding the pen.

The third is that hope is not something you wait for. It is something you record. When you can see, year by year, that you have shifted a little, the evidence does more for you than any amount of encouragement. Nobody is telling you that you are improving. You have the receipts.

People ask whether I write down goals. I do, but only the smallest kind of verb. Not "get promoted next year," but "finish that course before March." Big outcomes belong to luck. Small actions belong to me.

This year I wrote the eighth letter and sealed it, and put it in the notebook, which is now full, to sit in a row with the seven others. Next year I will open it the way you open a parcel that has been in the post for a long time.