Each year, I sit down to type a heartfelt email and schedule it to send exactly a year later to an unlikely recipient: me. It’s a practice I’ve done since 2022.
When I receive a letter from my past self, it’s a pleasant surprise and reminds me of what I’d hoped for 365 days ago — and what I’ve experienced since then.
“You are deserving of the best of everything. If that means being in a new living space next year, I know that will pan out,” I wrote to myself in October of 2023. A year later, I sat in my first apartment reading the letter and beaming with joy.
It wasn’t the first time I’d had that experience. In that same letter from 2023 I wrote, “I’m currently listening to Stevie Wonder.” I’d just seen the music icon perform live a few days before the message arrived in my inbox.
But it’s not just the goals I set and achieved, or the synchronicities I didn’t anticipate, that stand out to me. In each letter, I always encouraged myself to be more compassionate, to rest when I need to and to remember that “simply existing is enough. Anything else is surplus.”
