Last Thursday was the final meeting of my fall semester Writing for Media class. Final exams loomed. Exhaustion etched shadows beneath everyone’s eyes.
There were 21 students in the room, the survivors of three and a half months of composing and editing, learning the rigors of media writing in a language that is not their mother tongue. Bulgarians, Austrians, Kazakhs, Macedonians, Spaniards, Norwegians, Ukrainians, Albanians, Belarusians. The students spent the semester forging new neural pathways and sweating their way to new muscle memory. They were introduced to thinking about their readers, adopting the discipline of accuracy, and beholding the powerful glories of the simple declarative sentence.
I told them, “Tonight is our final class meeting, and you have one more writing assignment.” Someone groaned. Most of them looked at me with barely disguised dread. Am I going to hell if I admit I took devious pleasure in their fleeting agony? It was only because I suspected they would like what was ahead.
I continued, “This one won’t be graded. You don’t have to fact check it or submit it to an editing group. You can write whatever you want in whatever language you choose because no one but you will read it.”
Huh?
I passed out blank sheets of paper. I placed a stack of envelopes in the center of the table. “You will be writing a letter to yourself,” I said. “And after you do, I will collect these letters and hold them. Some months from now your letter will find its way to you. And you can welcome yourself to the person you have become.”
I encouraged them to dream. I encouraged them to reflect. I encouraged them to savor this tiny sphere of time they had been given when they were not being judged, being pushed, being talked at. I asked them, “What is it that you want to say to yourself? What is it you plan to do with your one wild and precious life?”
I put on some soft music. They hung their heads and began to write. I took out my phone and took the picture you see.
When I was 14, some ditzy advice column from an inane teen magazine suggested to an angsty adolescent that she should write a letter to herself, put it in an envelope and pledge to not open the letter for 10 years.
I did it. When I was 14, I subscribed to the Carrie Fisher school of aerodynamics: Immediate gratification isn’t soon enough. Writing the letter to myself was a dare. It was the first time I had taken the time to project into the future with words on paper. I had fantasized about being an astronaut, a social worker and a professional tap dancer. I had hoped I would marry someone funny. I saw myself in a convertible somewhere, but that is as far as future projection stretched. Until my first letter to myself.
My curly cursive looped onto lined notebook paper that I ripped from my three-ring binder. In between an enthusiasm of exclamation points I exhorted myself to not open the letter until I was 24. “Wait!!!!!” I wrote. “Just wait!!!!!”
And so I did. I tucked the letter into a shoebox of photographs that accompanied me as I transitioned from high school to university to my first job. The letter became a sacred object, a paper echo chamber of the adolescent me who had just started her period talking to the future me who had her first business card and shared an apartment with her boyfriend.
I still have the letter.
I can’t remember when I began the Letter to Myself ritual with my writing students. It was most likely an idea borne of desperation. Some semester or workshop. A final class. A scramble for a lesson plan. When I first tried it, what struck me was how hushed the room became, how each student knitted into a cocoon of their own making, swaddled, inward facing and absorbed.
Last Thursday I posted the photo of my students on Facebook in the middle of class. I watched them bent over their letters, writing to themselves, moving their hands across paper, spinning a web of intimacy with their thoughts.
At the end of class I walked home through the city under holiday lights strung onto the trees that line the pedestrian city center. I exhaled the semester and turned toward the Christmas break. I ate a grilled cheese sandwich and slept for 10 hours. When I opened my Facebook page the next day, I read comments from students across the globe testifying to the power of the letter.
One of my former students, Simona, wrote, “I had mine for a while now but I never read it because I knew what I wrote about and I wasn’t ready to read it. Feels great to finally read it now and know I am the person who I was hoping to be when I wrote it. Someone from your current class asked me what to expect for the last class and all I had to say was, ‘Something good.’”
Yeah. Something tells me I’m into something good.
