A letter from December 20th, 2016

Dear FutureMe, Here is a list of your talents: You are fun-loving. You care very much about others. Even with your sometimes-bleak outlook, you seem to come off as happy, hopeful, peppy, and fun. You want to do what you can to help others. You can, and do, work hard. You want to make others feel special so that they might have a happier life. You are willing to sacrifice. You have a positive energy. Here is a list of things for which you would like to forgive yourself: Your marriage. You weren’t perfect and neither was he. When you decided to get married, you were young and you had different values. The things you did wrong in the marriage do not define you nor make you a “bad” person. Though you may not want to excuse what you may have done wrong, you also don’t need to spend your life feeling guilty for it. Like right now, you’re making yourself sound pretty bad – someone else reading this might think you were a very bad spouse, but you know you weren’t. You know that you gave him so many years and so much leeway to make his and your lives better. And he did try. And you tried. But you have come so far since then. You need to erase the picture in your head of what might have been if he, and you, had tried harder. That is what gets you. You picture your late 20s and early 30s as having had the potential to be much better than they were. As it is, 26 to 34 just blends together. You lived with your mom. You worked for your brother. You came home and napped. You laid in bed on the weekends. You know there was more than that, but you feel like that is all it was. And maybe that is all that happened those eight years. So you did something – something that took courage, something that was difficult, something that changed your life. You decided that you and he should not have to be confined by this daunting circumstance of stagnancy. You had tried to go to school during that time and failed again, and again. Since you started going back to school after the divorce, you have taken 30 units and earned a 3.1667 GPA, bringing your current school GPA to over a 2.0. That change is worth celebrating. There is no reason to berate yourself for your past missteps when you’re making things better now. Here are your hopes for the future: Receive your bachelor degree by June 2019. Have a happy and successful marriage. Have two children. Become a teacher. Get your masters degree. Have a nicer house. Be more organized. Change the desire to procrastinate. Eat healthily. Have an exercise routine. Have life routines. Not having the made-up thoughts of others in your head. Be kinder and more compassionate to yourself. Think well of yourself. Make goals – daily, weekly, monthly, yearly, lifetime. Have a good sleep routine. Be kinder to others. Well that’s some stuff for now. There is a lot more for which you need to forgive yourself that we’ll need to go into later.