Ten Years Later, I Found My Old Journal and Wrote Back to the Stranger Who Wrote It
Photo: open worn journal notebook on wooden table with pen, via img.freepik.com
It was sitting in a box labeled "MISC — DO NOT TOSS" in my parents' garage in Ohio, wedged between a broken HDMI cable and a high school yearbook I have no memory of keeping. A navy Moleskine, corners chewed up, a Target receipt from March 2015 used as a bookmark.
My journal from ten years ago.
I want to tell you I put it down. I did not put it down. I sat on the cold garage floor for two hours reading the diary of a person I technically am but absolutely do not know.
This Person Was Convinced They Had It Figured Out
The first thing that jumped out: the confidence. Page after page of plans. The career trajectory, laid out in bullet points. The five-year relationship forecast. A whole section titled "Things I Will Never Do" — which, for the record, includes at least four things I have done, one of them twice.
2015 me had a spreadsheet soul. Everything was a step toward something. There's an entry that literally reads, "Once I get to Chicago, everything will click."
Buddy. I have news. I have several pieces of news.
The Cringe Was Real but So Was the Pain
Here's what I didn't expect: buried between the cringe-worthy entries about a guy who played acoustic guitar at parties (we all know the guy) was some genuinely hard stuff. An entry about my grandmother that just stops mid-sentence, like I couldn't finish it. Three consecutive days of "fine I guess" — which, having now lived a little, I recognize as code for not fine at all.
Ten-years-ago me was doing that thing where you perform wellness in your own private notebook, which is possibly the saddest trick in the book. Writing "fine I guess" to an audience of nobody is a special kind of lonely.
So I Wrote Back
That night, at my parents' kitchen table, I wrote a letter to 2015 me. Not a cutesy Instagram-style "dear past self, love who you became" thing. An actual letter. It started as a joke and got sincere around paragraph two, which is how most of my sincere moments happen.
Some highlights, lightly edited:
You're not going to believe this, but the Chicago plan doesn't happen. The backup plan happens instead, and honestly? It's better. You will be furious reading that. Accept it.
The guy with the guitar — you already know. Come on.
Also, I need you to hear this: "fine I guess" is a lie, and someday you'll get better at not telling it. The thing you couldn't finish writing about Grandma? You finish it eventually. It takes years. That's allowed.
One more thing. You keep writing that you're behind. Behind on the career, behind on the apartment, behind on some invisible schedule you invented. I'm writing this from a future where I've had the job, lost the job, had a better one, and none of it went according to your bullet points. You were never behind. There was no race. I know that sounds like a fortune cookie. I don't know how else to say it.
What Didn't Change (and Honestly, Fine)
The plot twist of the whole exercise: a lot of the important stuff held up. The things 2015 me cared about — the same three friends get name-dropped all through the journal, and they're still my people. The weird specific ambitions that felt embarrassing to admit (writing, specifically; making things, generally) never went away, even when I spent years pretending they had.
The spreadsheet soul softened. The spine didn't.
I keep the letter folded in the back of the old journal now. Not planning on a reply. Although knowing that guy, he'd have opinions.
