A Letter to Myself

Did you know that you could write a letter and have it e mailed to your future self? I just learned this, and I think it is so cool. Check out how it works, here at http://www.futureme.org/

Learning this just made me want to write a bunch of letters to myself and have them delivered in the future, as a way of checking in on me and my goals! My friend and I are doing a challenge with each other to lose 14 pounds and read 14 books this year. I should write myself a future letter to be delivered in 9 months as a check in, a reminder!

What brought me to this site is a series of writing worksheets I am doing. My assignment was to write a letter to myself, reminding me why I fell in love with writing. To practice being vulnerable in my writing, I thought I would share it here.

A Letter to Myself

You had dreams of writing. The end result was not always clear, the path sometimes murky, but you had dreams of writing.

Do you remember that you wanted to go to Ryerson College to take a course in journalism? That is what you thought you wanted to do, be a journalist, interview people, and write inspiring stories. In the midst of writing your poems, and essays, you got confused, you fell in love for the first time, you wanted to run away more often than you wanted to stay. Always though, you had a journal, you had the words in your head, the songs written inside you like a blueprint waiting to come out.

Thanks to an domineering high school love, you never did go to Ryerson College. At some point you decided that you didn’t want to become a journalist because you didn’t want to write what other people told you to write about. You wanted to travel and so you became a Travel Consultant. While in that career, you once spoke to a travel journalist who convinced you that journalism was a tough way to make a living, and at times, difficult to make the words come together about a topic you had no interest in. So from there, you dropped the idea, you dropped the dream you half hearted imagined for yourself. There was a period of time you stopped writing altogether.

You changed, you grew, and you looked within. There were times you just ignored who you were becoming and just lived day to day to exist. Then you had a daughter and things began to change. You wanted to live your life in a way that she could respect, learn from, and admire. You wanted to lead by example. Only something happened. The universe both gave you a gift and took something away at the same time. This little girl was not “normal”, she was not “average”, and her chromosome pattern and her doctors told you this. You coddled her and protected her and in taking all the time to do so, you were losing the essence of you and who you wanted to become.

Now you have within you, this fire burning, and your love for writing has come back to you. Your love of poems and lyrics and essays and the way the truth has a way of unfolding when you begin to put pen to paper or fingers to keyboard, is with you daily. Your end result and path seem a little clearer. You discovered a desire to write a book.

You now know that it was not about making a living writing, but living to write that story that was forming inside you, waiting for the right time to come out. You needed to live your life, have the gift of that beautiful girl given to you, and now you can write the rest of your story the way you always hoped it would unfold on the pages of the story called your life.

Photo courtesy of Namaste Cafe

I want you to remember that what you loved about writing was the way it made you feel less alone in a world where you felt only you recognized your surroundings. Your love of writing gave you a path to clear through all the clutter in your mind, and make sense of a lovely sweet girl...you, who grew up too fast, innocence taken, ideals that would never have effect. Writing helped you to come to terms with the life you created for yourself, and rip yourself from its grip. I want you to remember that writing was your survival mechanism, and within your words, is where you felt safe, fulfilled. In your writing is where you will realize your providence, find completion and learn be authentic to whom you are. I want you to remember that you were chosen for a life worth sharing, given a story worth telling. Now go on, write, and do it every day!

If you could write a letter to yourself, what would you say to yourself, NOW, or in the future? I hope when my letter comes back to me, I am writing every day and that my story is at least half way to being a book. Half way seems almost there.....almost.....

Thank you for stopping by!

Tannis