I opened it on the morning of my 24th birthday; Id slept with the envelope beside the bed so it would be the first thing I saw upon waking. I made my boyfriend leave the room, so I could read it alone. It felt the way Christmas morning feels when youre 6: deeply magical and filled with potential. When I unfolded the pages, though, I couldnt believe what I read. My 24-year-old self was horrified. It turns out I was an absolute fool at the age of 14. My 14-year-old self had two main concerns for her future self: 1) that she not be fat, and 2) that she had found love. The language was flowery; I beseeched myself to be a good (and thin) person.

Now the letter seems mostly funny and endearing to me. It makes me sad that I was so concerned with the shape of my body and how I might someday deserve the love of a man, but I also understand (and have the proof in writing) that we are all fools, in one way or another, at the age of 14. But my 24-year-old self was disgusted and disappointed. Id waited a decade, for what? My younger self had let my older self down. When my boyfriend read the loopy handwritten pages, he laughed out loud, and I glowered. I wrote a letter to my 34-year-old self later that day; I wanted to prove that I was more than Id shown earlier. That I wasnt silly or boy-obsessed. If these letters were a blueprint for who I was becoming, I wanted to make clear that I was becoming a person of substance.

The letter I wrote that day breaks my heart a little when I read it now. The 24-year old who wrote it is deeply worried about the next 10 years. She believes that the stakes are so high, that if she fails during this period, she will be a failure. She is scared she wont measure up, although its unclear to what standard, or who set the bar. She is specific about what she expects during those 10 years: that she will marry her college boyfriend, that they will have a child, that she will finish and publish the Gigi novel she is working on. That she will find a job either in publishing or as a high school teacher, to pay the bills while she writes.

Part of the reason I feel badly for her is because none of those plans came to fruition. I paid my bills by working as a personal assistant, first for a self-help writer and then for a rock musician. My college boyfriend and I became engaged after nearly a decade together, and then three months before our wedding he decided he wasnt ready to get married. All I can remember saying to him during that awful time was that he wasnt getting married, he was marrying me. I felt the distinction was key, but he didnt. We broke up, and for almost a year I felt so much pain that my skin ached while I walked. My Gigi novel was rejected by 80 agents, and I put it in a drawer. I wrote another novel, and although I found an agent for that book, it went unpublished, too. In my early 30s, I would fall in love again, with an Englishman who made me laugh, and who is now my husband. And at the start of our relationship, I sold my third novel to a publisher.

There were surprises during that decade, too. My parents after years of battle announced they were getting divorced, and then changed their minds inside of a month. I met and started a relationship with a half sister Id never known about. My 24-year-old self wasnt wrong about the stakes being high during that decade; thats why I feel sadness for the stressed girl writing down her futile plans while her boyfriend waited in the next room. The decade ahead would be filled with uncertainty and hard work and hope and crying alone in bed where no one could see.

See the rest here:
Dear Me: A Novelist Writes to Her Future Self - The New York Times