March 15, 2003
Dear self
I know you well and I know that you will forget this time in your life, the last year mainly, and so I wanted to write you a letter to let you know what you should remember. Read this letter later in life.
Most of all I want you to remember what it feels like to be you right now, what your view of the world is, and what your view of yourself is. Since I can't very easily do this, I will instead list a number of things that I feel are important in recreating a shell of your current self.
I know that without this list you would forget and mangle what you felt, saw, and did over the last year, so here it is in no particular order:
- Remember what it feels like to drive to work on your 30-minute commute past a small suburb in a rural area and then through the country past literal cotton fields with Mexican workers who are there when you drive to and from work, summer, and winter.
- Remember the music that you listened to - this is my best hope seriously of recreating this time - and just let your body feel your former self come out.
- Remember what it felt like to have a birthday this year and start to feel old, not because of a number, but because you are just now starting to think about the future for the first time in your life, and in the last year - the time since the last number - how much you have changed your view of yourself.
- Remember how it felt like a beginning and an ending all at the same time.
- Remember what it felt like to work with your hands for a few weeks with manual laborers who had spent their life doing it. After you quit this job and got a 'real' one doing what your degree was in, remember what it felt like to see those trucks go by or how it felt to see people out in the sun when you walked to your car. Remember also how you lost this feeling quickly.
- Remember the people that you met, and that hopefully have changed you (this is, after all, the only way to change?)
- N, who you met and talked to for 12 hours on the way back from training and then didn't wave to when you made eye contact through a window at TGI Friday's.
- Charles, who always trapped you and talked for hours about everything and was always so purely honest with people that it was refreshing and amazing - he would talk for hours about anything and given that you do this also entire days were wasted jumping from tangent to tangent until you looped back around to something technical and then started talking about work again.
- Tony, and the way he made you feel when he joked and criticized you and the way you handled it - by being nice because you had to. Remember how angry you would get at him and then how much you liked having him around sometimes when things weren't going well. Remember how you were disgusted by but recognized the way he lived his life. Don't forget how you realized that you have never gotten along with people with his personality and how you traced this back and learned something about yourself and then were able to get along with him more easily. Remember how it was anger and pity all rolled into one when it came to him, and remember how you had that dream where you beat him into the ground and then felt guilty when you woke up - but not in the dream. Remember how you thought that you were stupid because you didn't understand the way he thought and then you realized that he is like you but with no sense of beauty.
- Al, who was at times your unspoken mentor and inspired you in many ways but at the same time scared you as an example of how much work it takes to be as good as him - and remember how B and T were in contrast on many things and how that affected what you thought of them and of your future.
- Steve, who suprised you with his attitude about family and was rather clever at doing the right thing at the right time in order to do well.
- I would like you to remember how miserable you were when you first starting going to talk to somebody - how you were actually depressed but not depressed as in suicidal or anything. I would like you to remember how suicide as an idea (for other people) made sense to you finally at this time. And I want you to remember how you feel now so that you can feel the difference, but hopefully you are now so far away from that place that it will be too foreign to even imagine.
- Remember how it felt to live where you lived - in the middle of it all - and feel so lonely and at the same time like you were missing out on something.
- I want you to remember what it felt like to be at the beginning of a phase of your life when hopefully you got it all together.
- Remember how good it felt to finally discover - to reallly know - that you can change yourself.