I often encourage my patients to write a letter to themselves on their birthdays for the following year using a website called FutureMe.org, where you can post-date emails to yourself to any date in the future. This exercise is great to do on any day, really. Tomorrow is my birthday. I’ll be 32. Here is my letter.
This is it.
This is your life.
As Cheryl Strayed wrote, “The f— is your life. Answer it.”
There are some things that you thought were temporary, mere stepping stones on your way to someplace better, that you now realize are familiar friends, ever present in their essence, but varying in their specific details.
For instance:
1) You will ride buses.
You will never escape the bus. For a while taking the bus was seen as a temporary stop on your way to something else (a car?). You took the bus as a pre-teen, excited to finally be allowed to venture to parts of town alone. As a student, you took the bus to the mall, laughing at the ridiculousness of Kingston, Ontario, once you’d left the protective bubble of the student community, completely inappropriately, yet affectionately (and ignorantly) called The Ghetto.
You will visit other ghettos, also by bus, that are far more deserving of their names. However these ghettos will instead have hopeful names such as El Paraiso, or La Preserverancia. Those who live there will persevere. So will you.
Buses will take you over the mountains of Guatemala, to visit student clients in Bogota, Columbia. To desirable areas of Cartagena. You’ll ride them through India. They will carry you through Asia, bringing you to trains and airports.
You’ll ride buses as a doctor. You’ll ride the bus to your clinic every day.
Sometimes, on long busy days in Toronto, it’ll seem like you’ll spend all day trapped in a bus.
The bus is not a temporary reality of your life. The bus is one of the “f—s” of your life. You’ll learn to answer it. You’ll learn to stop dissociating from the experience of “getting somewhere” and realize you are always somewhere. Life is happening right here, and sometimes “right here” is on the seat of a bus. Eventually you start to open up, to live there. You start to live in the understanding that the getting somewhere is just as important as (maybe more than) arriving.
We breathe to fill our empty lungs. Almost immediately after they’re full, the desire to empty them overwhelms. Similarly, you board a bus to get somewhere, while you’re on the bus, you start to understand.
You’re already here.
Maybe you’ll graduate some day, to a car.
But sooner or later, you’ll board a bus.
And ride it again.
2). You’ll experience negative emotion, no matter who you are or what your life circumstance.
Rejection, worthlessness, sadness, and heart break, are constant friends. Sometimes they’ll go on vacation. They’ll always visit again.
You will never reach the shores of certainty. You will never be “done”. You may take consolation in momentary pauses, where you note your confidence has found a rock to rest its head against. But you’ll grow bored of your rock (it is just a rock, lifeless, after all). You’ll then dive back into the deep waters of doubt, risk despair, and swim again.
Happiness isn’t a final destination. Instead, it’s a roadside Starbucks: a place to refuel, and maybe passing through is an encouragement you’re headed in the right direction.
3). The people in your life are like wisps of smoke.
They will come and go. Some of them will simply whiff towards you, visiting momentarily. Their names you’ll hardly remember. You’ll share ice cream and one deep, healing conversation about love that you’ll remember for years to come. You’ll reflect on this person’s words whenever you consider loving someone again.
You’ll remember the ice cream, the warm sea breeze, the thirst that came afterwards, the laughter. But it will be hard to remember his name… David? Daniel? You won’t keep in touch, but you’ll have been touched.
There will be others who come to seek your help. You might help them. You might not. They might come back regardless, or never return. Many times it will have nothing to do with the quality of your help. Or you.
Sometimes the smoke from the flame will thicken as you breathe oxygen into it. People will come closer, you’ll draw them in, inhale them.
Sometimes you’ll cough and blow others away.
You’ll wonder if that was a wise choice. You’ll think that it probably was.
Does a flame lament the ever-changing smoke it emits? Does the surrounding air try to grasp it? Do either personalize the dynamic undulations of smoke, that arise from the candle, dance in the fading light and dissipate?
Flames don’t own their smoke. They don’t seem to believe that the smoke blows away from them repelled by some inherent deficiency in them. Flames seem to accept the fact that smoke rises and disappears, doing as it’s always done.
4). Not everything is about you.
There will be times when failure lands in your lap. You’ll wonder if it’s because there is some nascent problem with you, that only others can see. These failures will tempt you to go searching for it.
You’ll find these faults. These deficiencies. In yourself, in others, in life itself.
You’ll wonder if it explains your failures. You’ll wonder why the failures had to happen to you.
You think that people can smell something on you, that your nose is no longer able to detect, like overwhelming perfume that your senses have grown used to, but that assaults the senses of others around you.
Failure and rejection, cause your heart to ache. Your heart aches, as all hearts do. The hearts of the virtuous, famous, heroic, and rich ache just as hard. The hearts of those who have committed evil deeds also split apart. (The only hearts that don’t may be the truly broken, the irredeemable. And those people are rare.)
You will experience joys. Your heart will mend and break, a thousands times.
And it has nothing to do with you.
5). Success is not a final destination.
There are no destinations. You will ride buses, you will feel happy, you will feel joy. You will try. You will succeed.
And you won’t.
You’ll pick up the pieces of your broken heart. You will mend them. You will flag down the next bus.
You will board it.
You will grasp—you can’t help it. Grasping will only push the wisps of smoke away, causing it to disappear in your hands. This will frustate you, but you’ll keep doing it.
Over and over.
And failing.
You’ll grasp some more and come up empty, thinking that it is because something is wrong with me. There is lots wrong with you.
There is lots right with you.
Most things have nothing to do with you. (That might be just as painful to accept
But healing as well.)
No one said healing didn’t hurt. Sometimes it f—ing hurts! But, as Cheryl Strayed wrote, “the f— is your life”.
And answering it is your life’s process.
