Dear Past Me,
I’m switching things up a bit and writing to you, 15 years in the past, for advice. After coping recently with a cancer diagnosis and treatment, a global pandemic, the sudden and unexpected death of someone I love, and recent medical challenges, I’ve become anxious about the future, and I’ve lost my ability to take risks. New technology does feed the negative – we even have a thing now called doomscrolling.
I look back at your ability to take leaps of faith and wonder if you have any advice on how I might recapture that part of my psyche?
Today Me
Dear Today Me,
Thanks for giving me the opportunity to counsel you at this time – although I’m not sure I’m embracing the heads-up about that global pandemic!
I think my dreams and optimism for the future are a part of having the courage to leap these days. With all you’ve experienced lately, I can see why that might be more difficult to summon.
But another piece of our mutual psyche is the shared problem-solving ability, and that doesn’t go away because we age or experience challenges. If anything, it gets stronger and wiser – as should your faith in yourself that you can handle the things life throws at you.
A question for you…did the last 15 years turn out at all as you had imagined? If not (and it sounds, from my perspective here in the past, as if it didn’t), did you still experience joy? Learn a lot? Did you meet good people and have wonderful experiences?
Did those happen when you made efforts to let go of your fears and anxieties to take some leaps? Even just baby steps?
So, my advice is to remember how you’ve managed, your whole life, to readjust, pivot, modify, adapt, tweak. I’m running out of synonyms, but I think you get the picture. Lean away from the pessimism and hopelessness, and lean into a belief in yourself.
And maybe work a little more on embracing the positive end of the spectrum in terms of what your world has to offer.
In other words, lay off the doomscrolling.
Past Me
