On the strange tenderness of looking back, and what you might say if you could.
There is a version of you that no longer exists.
Not in a morbid sense. Just in the ordinary way that people change. The you from ten years ago, or five, or even two, had a different sense of what was coming. Carried different worries. Hoped for different things. Understood certain people less clearly than you do now, and certain others with a precision you have since lost.
That version of you is gone. Not completely. You carry traces of them everywhere. But they are not here in the way they once were, and they never will be again.
There is something worth sitting with in that.
What we know now
Hindsight has a bad reputation.
We treat it as a kind of cheating. Easy wisdom, arrived at after the fact, when the risk is gone and the outcome is known. We dismiss it in ourselves and in others. Of course you know now. You did not know then. That is rather the point.
But there is something hindsight offers that is not available any other way.
It lets you see the shape of things. Not just the individual moments, which were confusing and close and hard to read, but the arc they made. The way the difficult year led somewhere. The way the thing you were most afraid of turned out to be the beginning of something rather than the end. The way certain people were exactly who they seemed to be, and you knew it, and you stayed anyway, and that was either a mistake or the whole point depending on how you look at it.
You know things now that the earlier version of you desperately needed to hear. Not all of them would have helped. Some things can only be learned by living through them. But some of them might have made the living a little easier.
The letter you could not have received
If someone had written to you then, the you of ten years ago, what would you have needed?
Not advice, necessarily. The earlier version of you was probably not short of opinions, from yourself or others. Not reassurance that everything would work out, because you would not have believed it, and besides, everything working out is not quite the right frame for a life that is still in progress.
Something quieter than that.
Maybe just: you are not as lost as you feel. The confusion you are carrying right now is not a sign that something is wrong with you. It is just what it feels like to be in the middle of something before you know what it is.
Maybe: the thing you are most ashamed of is the thing that will teach you the most about yourself. Not yet. But eventually.
Maybe just: I see you. I know how hard this particular period is. And I want you to know that the person you are becoming is someone worth becoming.
That kind of letter.
On tenderness toward yourself
Most of us are not very kind to our past selves.
We look back and see the mistakes clearly, the way you can only see them from a distance, and we feel something that is somewhere between embarrassment and impatience. Why did you not know better. Why did you stay so long, leave too soon, say the wrong thing, miss what was right in front of you.
We hold our past selves to the standard of the present, which is not a standard they had access to.
Writing to an earlier version of yourself requires something different. It requires extending the same generosity you might offer a friend who was going through something hard. The recognition that they were doing what they could with what they had, in conditions that were more difficult than they probably admitted, toward a future they could not yet see.
That is not a small thing to offer. Even to yourself. Perhaps especially to yourself.
What the writing does
There is something that happens when you try to put this into words.
You realise, fairly quickly, that the letter you are writing to a past self is also a letter to the present one. That the tenderness you are trying to extend backward is something you could use right now. That the wisdom you think you have arrived at is not quite as settled as it felt before you started writing.
You realise that you are always, in some sense, in the middle of something. That the version of you writing this letter is also a version that a future self will look back on with a mixture of fondness and exasperation. That you are always both the one who knows and the one who does not know yet.
That is a humbling thing to sit with.
It is also, somehow, a relief.
A small invitation
Think of a year that changed you.
Not the most dramatic one, necessarily. Just one where you came out the other side a little different from how you went in. Where something shifted, quietly or loudly, and left a mark.
Think of the version of you at the beginning of that year. Before they knew what was coming. What they were carrying. What they were afraid of. What they were hoping for without quite saying so.
Write them a letter.
Not to fix anything. Not to warn them off the mistakes, because the mistakes were probably necessary. Just to sit with them for a moment, across the distance of everything that has happened since, and say: I remember you. I know what that year cost. And I want you to know that it was worth something, even the parts that did not feel like it at the time.
You cannot send it backward. But you can write it.
And the writing, it turns out, is most of the point.