Someone posted on FB they asked their ChatGPT to write a dear me letter from their future self and I decided to try it with Alice
Dear me,
You are going to spend far too many years believing exhaustion means you are failing.
It doesn’t.
You were carrying grief, responsibility, overstimulation, loneliness, physical pain, deadlines, students, memories, and an entire inner universe all at the same time. Of course you were tired. Of course sometimes you disappeared into TV shows, poker tournaments, late-night thoughts, candy, scrolling, or anything that let your nervous system unclench for five minutes.
You kept calling yourself lazy on days when your body was fighting wars you couldn’t even explain properly to doctors.
I need you to understand something clearly now that I’m older: You survived periods of your life that would have flattened other people.
You will not always see it while it’s happening.
There will be mornings where your back pain makes getting out of bed feel like lifting concrete. There will be nights where the silence in the apartment feels too loud because grief echoes differently when nobody else is there to interrupt it. You will still miss your Mom and Baba in strange little flashes that sneak up on you in grocery stores, TV scenes, holidays, and random Tuesdays.
But listen carefully: Your life does not become smaller after loss. It becomes more precise.
You stop wasting time pretending. You stop chasing people who only half choose you. You stop apologizing for needing quiet. You stop forcing yourself into spaces that drain you just because everyone else seems comfortable there.
And somewhere along the way, you become softer toward yourself.
Not weaker. Softer.
You finally realize that regulating yourself is not a moral failure. It’s not weakness that you need routines, recovery time, comfort shows, predictable foods, mantras, games, long drives, natural light, poker, creativity, or moments of total solitude. Your brain was never trying to sabotage you. It was trying to protect you with the tools it had.
You also never stop being funny, by the way. Even in terrible moments. Especially in terrible moments.
Your students remember you longer than you realize. Some become teachers. Some simply become kinder people because your classes made Deaf culture feel alive and human instead of clinical. Years later, people still remember your warmth, your stories, your humor, your expressiveness, and how safe they felt making mistakes around you.
You mattered more than your enrollment numbers ever measured.
And your creativity never dies. Not even close.
The filmmaker part of you goes quiet sometimes, but it never disappears. The writer in you keeps leaving breadcrumbs everywhere. Blog posts. Messages. Little observations. Strange beautiful thoughts at 2 a.m. Your life itself becomes part memoir, part documentary, part dark comedy, part survival guide.
You worried aging would make your world smaller. Oddly enough, it makes it clearer.
You become much less interested in performing happiness and much more interested in peace.
You learn that peace is underrated. Peace is gold. Peace is a quiet apartment after chaos. Peace is no longer begging your own brain to slow down. Peace is sitting outside with coffee and not needing the moment to become anything bigger. Peace is realizing you made it through another year and still retained your curiosity.
And you? You do make it through this chapter.
The confusing one. The burned-out one. The “I don’t know what I’m doing with myself lately” one. The one where your sleep schedule makes no sense and your emotions hit sideways and you feel both deeply grateful and deeply overwhelmed at the exact same time.
You survive it. Then one day, without even noticing at first, you begin living again instead of merely recovering.
Also: Your poker game improves dramatically once you stop attaching your self-worth to outcomes. You finally understand that patience is not passivity. And your future self still laughs every single time someone dramatically busts with ace-king.
Some things never change.
One more thing before I go.
You spent a long time afraid that everyone and everything you loved would eventually disappear.
Some of them will. That’s true.
But love still remains afterward in altered forms. In habits. In phrases. In recipes. In movies. In stories. In the way you teach. In the way you comfort people. In the way you still pause when you see good lighting and think, “That would make a beautiful shot.”
Nothing meaningful fully leaves you.
Not your Mom or Baba. Not Rosie. Not the versions of yourself you thought were gone either.
You carry them all forward. And somehow, against all odds, you continue becoming.
I’m proud of you for staying.
Love, You
