What started out as a pivot in my late night creative jam just one week ago is now a legit newsletter with over 3,500 subscribers. Like. WHAT. Aside from the lovely comments you all left, I've heard from so many people from near and far—both in distance and in time. Among the first subscribers of Novel and Routine include one of my best friends from 7th grade, my husband (who got a notification from LinkedIn before I told him about it—shoutout to our Growth team), my hairstylist, one of my first bosses ever, and many more of you who are giving a shot at this thing I'm doing. Talk about a trust and accountability building exercise!
I will strive to get some serious content planning done, but for now, I will write about what I feel like when I feel like it. And today, I want to talk about having a conversation with one's future self, and how you need other people's help to do it. In conversations about giving advice, especially in the professional context, we often ask people who have reached a certain level of credibility, milestones, or achievements, what they would tell their younger version if they could go back in time. Is it because of what they say about hindsight and all that? What would it be like if we could talk to our future self instead?
Poet Mary Ruefle talks about the process of writing as a dialogue that started from the past that she simply carries forward but without a way to reach the intended recipient: "I began writing because I had made friends with the dead: they had written to me, in their books, about life on earth and I wanted to write back and say yes, house, bridge, river, hair, no, maybe, never, forever." There's something quite haunting in that sentence, remnants of unrealized conversations that have nowhere to go but forward, and we, in their future, in turn, continue to write forward. There's also something beautiful here, in that writing is a conversation.
I believe growing as a person requires a conversation, too. But that conversation has to involve other people who have seen a version of your future. I'm talking about people whose life experiences can extend your own vision—people who have been in rooms you haven't had the opportunity to step in yet; people who've made mistakes you've yet to make, and can steer you gracefully from the worst of it; people who know what it's like to shift one's perspective and see things from many more angles; people who can empathize with you how scary it is to change things up but that it's not always something to be afraid of. Their stories are not exactly a blueprint or a manual for you, but they are exactly the kinds of elixirs you need to be able to dream and imagine yourself in ways people—including you—haven't seen you yet.
And that, sometimes, involves leaving people behind. Not permanently nor coldly, and certainly never without gratitude. Their lessons and imprint on you go with you, no matter where you go. But sometimes, especially when you're trying to grow leaps and bounds and occupy spaces you've never been, you're going to need people who have seen and experienced the world beyond your current context. That's how I discovered my future self, in conversations with other people.