An Open Letter To 2019 Me
By: Lark Morrigan
Tags: Future, Mental Health, Poetry, Self, Life

Dear 2019 me,

It is 11:37 pm as I am writing this in a dimly lit room on November 30, 2020 with a message from the future. One filled with warnings. With premonitions. With no-nonsense tough truths you’ve avoided confronting throughout the years prior to this one. With sorrow. But most of all, with thinly veiled messages of hope, not as powerful as you had wanted but still enough to save your life when you feel like you can’t go on.

In the wise words of Charles Dickens, “It was the best of times, it was the worst of times, it was the age of wisdom…” and you will finally begin to not only understand it but to live it in ways you couldn’t have fathomed.

You will experience a time like no other, a time of great and terrible unrest and uncertainty beyond all understanding. You will spend many days and nights completely and utterly overwhelmed by the entirety of it all, yet you will not rest. You will refuse to rest and insist on pushing through restless nights pouring your heart out and excavating the darkest, untouched corners of your mind and turn your madness, your longing, your grievances, your contemplative musings, and your depths into poetry and prose, written with a voice that is irrevocably yours and yours alone.

You will grow, but not in the way that’s outwardly praiseworthy. Not in a way that’s lauded by our digital fast food culture of instant gratification. You will not capture the attention of the masses, but you will begin to understand that you were born to capture your creative essence, whether anybody stood by you or not. Whether anyone deemed it worthy or not — you were born to bleed, you were born to turn your pain into something humble, soft, and reminiscent of ages bygone, yet distinctly your own. And nothing can ever take that away from you.

You will face defeat by experiencing many nights of debilitating resistance. You will push through creative drought after creative drought and doubt your own abilities. You will feel like giving up and you’ll claim that all hopes for your own artistic significance will amount to nothing and be discouraged far too many times to count.

You will find belonging. You will feel alone in the world.

You will find yourself. You will lose yourself.

You will be desperate to grasp for any spark within and light it when no light will shine from the outside. You will want to end your own life (many times over, but never come close to it).

You will find newfound confidence. You will be utterly humiliated, disappointed in yourself, and ashamed — and sometimes that will be too much for you to bear, but you will bear it anyway.

I see your skepticism. I see your cynicism. I see your tendency to skew negatively and use the harsh reality to dim your hopes and to shield yourself from disappointment.

I’m going to tell you now that you are right. You will be disappointed. This is not to discourage you but to challenge you to rise up and push through when you least feel like it — and you will truly learn what it means to put your head down and create something from your inner turmoil that haunts you and rages within, with depths that you are beginning to understand for the first time. Whenever you feel like surrendering to the chaos, despair, and desolation is far easier to doing what your true self is born to do, you will not cave in — you will question the merits of staying small, time and time again, because you were not born to remain powerless or creatively stifled. You cannot and will not tolerate it.

But I can promise you that you will see a remarkable difference, not in any way you imagine or any shallow vain dream that the world allures you with, yet it will change you regardless of how humble it may seem.

It will shake you. It will solidify your foundation. It will break you down many times over and you will not see an end to this, yet you will treasure some humbling truths about the world that you couldn’t have learned otherwise. Your output will be greater than anything you’ve done before, yet you won’t see it as enough because you will feel intensely dissatisfied for not rushing like others do. This will be your greatest source of resistance, frustration, and immense self-doubt.

But you’ll create because there is no other way out of your mental wreckage. You want to be free, so you will free yourself in the only way you know how.

Ultimately, you will be disappointed to find out that your life is not what you make it. Not even a tiny fraction of it will go your way, but that does not excuse you from letting life pass you by.

2020 will feel like the end of times, and you will find that your mental fortitude is simultaneously enough and not enough.

No matter what happens, remember this — You are fire and brimstone. You are a breath of crisp autumn air, blowing gently from the dawn of time. You are despair. You are euphoria. You are an inevitable ending. You are a beginning that none could ever expect.

You are the tears sprung from a bottomless abyss, tucked away from the world. You are the delight and laughter of a thousand sunrises, both ancient and new.

You are a tumultuous storm on the move, with no intention of stopping. You are a silent rainfall on a cold, gray afternoon.

You are the grave you dug for yourself. You are the resurrected sparrow in search of a new sky to call your own.

You are insignificant, yet more significant than you’ll ever know, in the ways that truly matter.

You will find joy in the quiet moments. You will reflect and ponder at ungodly hours of the night. You will bottle everything up and pretend you’re soldiering through just fine, only to cry out in anguish in the middle of the night with nobody to comfort you. You will feel everything intensely, including and especially the way you treat yourself harshly. The way you tend to push yourself over the metaphorical edge, seeking a permanent way out of the humiliation that comes from never being enough for yourself — even if the romantic dreamer in you does believe that you are insufficient and begs you not to allow a bitter, tragic end to be your own doing. And this side of you will save your life, so be gentle with her, love her, and listen to her, even when the pressure around you makes you cave into your nihilistic, bitter, cynical side that takes hopelessness and lack of belief in oneself as “the truth.”

But that faith in yourself, even when there is no outward proof of greatness whatsoever, is what will ultimately lift you up when you are on your knees, waiting for life to be over.

It will not be over. No, you are about to witness a new beginning. And with every new beginning, you will experience loss, sorrow, and many restless nights questioning yourself. Questioning the world. Questioning all that you’ve known. Questioning your path ahead — if there be any at all.

You will listen to the same somber songs over and over again and really feel them in your bones, until their melodies and words become ingrained within you. You will search for answers to questions you were too afraid to ask, only to find that the answers were never what you expected.

You will gain clarity. You will hone in on what truly makes you you for the first time in your life and feel renewed by the way you reflect your inner world to those who are willing to understand it. For those who find it a place of solace and quiet beauty that you wish were more commonplace. You will share your voice — the voice you were too ashamed of your whole life — with total strangers for the first time, for anyone to hear.

You are a force. A quiet and almost undetectable one. Not many will see it and most of all, you will fail to see it in yourself. But a force nonetheless.

You won’t know how to prepare for 2020. It will teach you that you can’t.

And that from this point on, nothing will adequately prepare you and you’ll just have to push through, adapt, and evolve in the process of grappling with changes all around you, within you, and ahead of you, whether it be through brute mental force or through slow moments of deep reflection. You won’t always know when to honor your own natural pace and you will try, in vain, to rush ahead, only to find yourself being pushed back — and you won’t always know why. Yet you will continue to press on by crafting a new life on your own terms and re-inventing yourself, down to the last infinitesimal layer.

And when the darkness encircles you, reread the poems that you’ve held dear and allow them to comfort you when all light within you has died.

But no matter you face, always remember, that regardless of how insufficient you may seem to society and to those who think you’ll amount to nothing, you are enough for yourself — you can change, you can grow, you can turn your own inner chaos into order and refined beauty in a way nobody else can. Don’t let anyone else tell you otherwise.

Sincerely,

Your 2020 self

P.S. Keep these words close to you. You will need them: