When I was ten years old, I wrote a letter to my future self and buried it in my backyard. Seventeen years later, I remembered that I was supposed to remember to dig it up two years earlier.
I looked forward to getting a nostalgic glimpse into my childhood—perhaps I would marvel at my own innocence or see the first glimmer of my current aspirations. As it turns out, it just made me feel real weird about myself.
The letter was scrawled in green crayon on the back of a utility bill. My ten-year-old self had obviously not spent much time planning out the presentation of it. Most likely, I had simply been walking through the kitchen and suddenly realized that it was entirely possible to write a letter to my future self.
The overwhelming excitement of this realization probably caused me to panic and short-circuit, making me unable to locate proper writing implements. There was no time for that kind of thing.
I did, however, manage to fight through the haze of chaos and impulse long enough to find a crayon stub and a paper surface to mash it against.
The letter begins thusly:
Dear 25 year old [note: not “Dear 25-year-old me” or “Dear 25-year-old self,” just “Dear 25 year old”],
Do you still like dogs? What is your favarite dog? Do you have a job tranning dogs? Is Murphy still alive? What is youre favarite food?? Are mom and dad still alive?
I feel it’s important to note the order of those questions. Obviously, dog-related subjects were my chief concern (Murphy was my family’s dog), followed closely by the need to know my future favorite food (I feel that the double question marks speak to how important I thought that question was). Only then did I pause to wonder whether my parents had survived.
The letter continues with a section titled “About me”:
My name is Allie and I am ten years old. I have blound hair and blue eyes. My favarite dog is a german shepard. My second favarite dog is a husky. My third favarite dog is a Dobberman Pincher.
This is troubling for a number of reasons, the first of which is that I apparently thought my future self wouldn’t be aware of my name or eye color.
The second thing is the fact that I just tacked on my favorite dog breeds at the end there, like it was every bit as important to my identity as the other things. As if my past self had imagined my future self standing in the yard above the upturned earth, clutching my letter and screaming, “BUT WHAT DOGS DID I LIKE??? HOW AM I SUPPOSED TO UNDERSTAND MY IDENTITY WITHOUT KNOWING WHAT DOGS I LIKED WHEN I WAS TEN???”
I took a break from writing at that point to draw several pictures of what appear to be German shepherds.
Below the German shepherds, I wrote the three most disturbing words in the entire letter—three words that revealed more about my tenuous grasp on reality than anything else I have uncovered about my childhood. There, at the bottom of the letter, I had taken my crayon stub and used it to craft the following sentence:
Please write back.
Judging by the thick, purposeful lines in each letter, I was applying a truly impressive amount of pressure to the crayon. The sincerity of the request is unmistakable. When I asked my future self what my favorite dog is or whether my mom and dad were still alive, I actually expected to get answers. And, apparently, I still expected to be ten years old when I got those answers.
Please write back. I imagine myself patiently standing in the yard, day after day, thinking, Any time now . . . It’s going to happen soon, I just know it . . .
Time travel is a complex subject that I don’t expect a ten-year-old to fully understand, but this is more than just a basic misunderstanding of time travel.
I’m almost definitely not a time traveler, but in case I am, I decided to write back. In fact, I decided to write letters to several iterations of my past self, because I felt there were important things I could explain to myself or things I could warn myself about.
Allow me to begin with a letter to my two-year-old self:
Dear two-year-old,
Face cream is not edible—no matter how much it looks like frosting, no matter how many times you try—it’s always going to be face cream and it’s never going to be frosting.
I promise I wouldn’t lie to you about this. It’s honestly never going to be frosting.
For the love of fuck, please stop. I need those organs you’re ruining.
Dear four-year-old,
Allow me to preface this by saying that I don’t know why you started eating salt in the first place, but regardless of the precipitating circumstances, there you are.
As soon as you became aware that eating huge amounts of salt is really, really, uncomfortably salty, you should have stopped eating salt. That’s the solution. The solution is not to begin eating pepper to cancel out the salt.
You’ve found yourself in this predicament several times now, and every time you get trapped in this totally preventable cycle. You’ve done more than enough experimenting to come to the conclusion that pepper is not the opposite of salt all by yourself, but somehow you seem to remain stubbornly unaware of this fact.
To reiterate, no matter how much pepper you eat, it won’t undo the ludicrous amount of salt you ate before it. The only thing you are accomplishing by eating pepper is making your mouth taste like pepper AND salt.
Similarly, switching back to salt again won’t cancel out the burning from the pepper you ate to cancel out the original salt. How is this so difficult to understand? You can stop whenever you want to.
As a side note, you really need to start learning from your mistakes. Believe me, I know what happens when you discover electric fences next year, and you could do without that seventh jolt of electricity.
What the fuck is wrong with you? Normal children don’t have dead imaginary friends. Normal children don’t pick open every single one of their chicken pox scabs and then stand naked and bleeding in the darkened doorway to their bedroom until someone walks past and asks what they are doing. Furthermore, normal children don’t respond by saying, “I wanted to know what all my blood would look like.” Normal children also don’t watch their parents sleep from the corner of the room. Mom was really scarred by The Exorcist when she was younger, and she doesn’t know how to cope with your increasingly creepy behavior. Please stop. Please, please stop.
Dear six-year-old,
You’re having an absurdly difficult time learning the letter R. You practice all the time, and you have mastered every other letter in the alphabet—both uppercase and lowercase—but for reasons beyond my comprehension, R just destroys you.
Look at this:
How does that happen?? How do you mess something up that badly?
The first one is understandable, but what’s going on with that middle one? How did that extra protrusion get there? And look at the tiny one on the right—that one has four protrusions. I’m not an expert on protrusions, but that’s way too many.
I think if you took some time to relax and really look at the letter R, you’d see that it’s not nearly as complicated as you’re making it.
Look at the other children around you. Do you see how they’re wearing clothing? That’s because they’re seven years old and they’ve all realized that it is no longer appropriate to take their clothes off in public. But you haven’t realized that, have you. People have tried to explain it to you. Your teachers have tried, your parents have tried, even the other students have expressed discomfort with your persistent and inexplicable nakedness. But you just don’t stop.
Why do you want to be naked so badly? Do you even know why? Are you overtaken by forces beyond your control that make you do this?
Regardless, clothing is a reality that you need to accept. There are no loopholes to this. You can’t take your clothes off and hide in the corner hoping no one notices. You can’t trick the teachers into letting you be naked by burying yourself in the sandbox—your clothes are in a pile next to you. They know.
Dear ten-year-old,
Wow, you really like dogs. In fact, you like dogs so much that I’m not even sure it’s emotionally healthy. It might be normal to love dogs a lot, or to be really interested in dogs, but you go way, way past that. Normal children don’t walk around pretending to be a dog nearly as much as you do, for example. You’re ten. It makes people wonder about your developmental progress when you growl and bark at them.
An even more concerning issue is the obstacle course. Fine, you want to train your dog to run through an obstacle course. That’s pretty normal. What isn’t normal is making your mother time you as you crawl through the course on all fours, over and over and over again. You’re making Mom think that she did something wrong to make you this way.
Now that we’ve gotten that out of the way, allow me to answer your questions:
Do you still like dogs? Yes, but not as much as you do. I’ve developed a healthy relationship with dogs.
What is your favarite dog? I don’t know. This may come as a surprise to you, but knowing exactly where each dog breed ranks on my list of favorites isn’t the pressing issue that it used to be.
Do you have a job tranning dogs? No. I can’t even train my own dogs, let alone the dogs of other people.
Is Murphy still alive? Of course not. I don’t know whether you’re being optimistic or you actually don’t understand that dogs usually won’t live to be twenty-five, but you really set yourself up for a lot of disappointment there.
What is youre favarite food? Nachos. Which is fortunate, because in the future, you’re dysfunctional and you don’t take care of yourself, so you end up eating a whole lot of nachos.
Are mom and dad still alive? Actually, you turned out to be Batman, so we had to have them put down for story-line purposes.
Dear thirteen-year-old,
I think everyone was relieved when you started to grow out of your unhealthy obsession with dogs. Unfortunately, now you think you are a wizard. I know this because I found your collection of spells.
Tell me, how does mixing Dijon mustard with sand and then eating it make someone love you?
First of all, I thought your extensive early experiences with ingesting non-food substances would put you off of attempting something like this. Secondly, no one is going to love you until you stop doing things like trying to make them love you by eating mustard–sand.
Dear other iterations of my past self,
Thank you for not being so goddamn weird that I felt I had to address you personally in a letter from the future. I commend you.
