To my dearest self in 2025,
Are you well? As someone who doesn’t like to dwell on the past, I wonder if you catch yourself thinking about this bizarre moment in time. Do you still watch too much netflix? Do you remember your obsession with that show about a dark humanity’s future? Do you remember living in an episode of dystopian Netflix show Black Mirror? In our season’s recap, couples have courted each other in virtual reality (hello, pocket camp), everyone and their mother has imprisoned themselves on social media and don't even get me started on the robot dogs surveillancing our every move. This experience has taught me that it is entirely possible to be bored and terrified at the same time. Beyond that, it’s taught me that this was the moment we, I, changed.
I'm writing this from the comfort of my living room with a tall pitcher of lemonade and an absurdly comparable size of hand sanitizer beside it, because that's what happens when life gives you lemons and covid-19. This forced isolation has made me confront much more than my beliefs on personal hygiene. In the time leading up to this letter, I’ve discovered a fondness for cooking and the benefits of keeping a timely sleep schedule. This was the moment I realised what it really meant to live well.
In less than two weeks, we will return to some normalcy but I think it will be a long time before I walk down the aisle of a boeing 737. It brings me a little peace that in five years from now, you wouldn’t panic at the thought of someone letting out a slight cough on your flight. I hope you’ll be too busy planning an ambitious travel itinerary to even notice.
This may be a wildly unpopular opinion: I don’t want things to go back to the way they were. I deserve more than that. It took a pandemic for me to confront the fact that I wasn’t taking care of myself. I can only see that now because of how much effort I put into building a healthier home for me and my soul. At the start of the circuit breaker I struggled to complete a mile, I couldn’t make myself a decent meal and home was just a storage for me to collapse into after an arduous day of doing too much in too little time. Like the rest of my generation, I tormented myself by becoming a work martyr, guilty at the thought of drawing boundaries between my work and home life. I was disinclined to try new things and take time off for myself because I believed that if I wasn’t stressed out and struggling, I was failing to achieve greatness in my work. When did I even become that way?
Working through these internal conversations have forced me to understand the person I want to be quarantined with. I’ll leave you with this final thought on our future together; live well. We deserve it. Don’t forget the sanitizer.
Love, Rebecca