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Dear Future Me,

I hope you’re no longer scared. Frightened by that six letter F word that brands your brain with trepidation and whispers in your ear “I’m not leaving.” It's hard. It’s difficult to write a letter to a person I’ve never met. A person I have a hard time envisaging. I tend to lie in bed at night and reminisce the past, but dare never fathom my fate. God’s providence petrifies me. Not that I don’t have reliance with God, but more so that I don’t have assurance with myself. The prospect of my entire life is confined in my little hands. Or is it?

The unknown. It's a perpetual thought. An inexplicable abstraction. You can’t predict it. You can’t prevent it. You can’t control it. You just have to handle it. Capture whatever it throws at you and embrace it. Whether that be good or bad it will become a part of you. Let it chip and break, craft and carve you. Let it change you.

Change. It happens. You just wake up somedays and decide that you don’t want to feel a certain way anymore, or ever again. So you change. Just like that. And that’s why this letter is so difficult to construct. Not because I do not know myself, but because I am not familiar with the forethought version of you. My brain isn’t accustomed to your thoughts. My body doesn’t have a habitual sense for your heartbeat, your heart ache, or even your heart if you will still have one. It doesn’t know the rhythm of your tears. It cannot yet sense the pang in your feet that you will receive from traveling to places that I do not know of yet. Its unfamiliar with the faces you identify as home. It cannot detect the emotions that will slap you in the face, nor the ones that will fill your soul with comfort. I’d give you advice Shania. Make you promises, but promises are stupid and you know that. Push hard enough and they all prove to be empty. You earn wisdom from experience. So how am I supposed to enlighten you with knowledge that I myself cannot assimilate. Exactly, I can’t. No one can help you. You’re all alone. This one's all you. It’s all your biggest fears combined working against you. And the only words I can spit out are good luck. Try not to mess it up. Your future I mean. You’re already messed up enough. You can’t change the past, but you can embrace it. Let it change you. Kick it in the face, and use that sagacity to dominate the future, defeat the unknown.

Xoxo,

Shania