An intriguing idea for an end-of-year journaling prompt landed in my inbox today: a letter to my former self. (Thanks, employee assistance program! Love the free yoga classes.)

The relevant instructions note:

It’s a reflection on what I’ve learned and what’s changed. It’s therapeutic for me, kind of like solidifying my storyline. It helps me piece together all the important plot points to create my own narrative.

If you are interested in writing a letter to your past self, refer back to your old journal entries and posts to see what you were thinking about most of 2022. Write to your past self in 2021. Share with them any nuggets of wisdom you learned during the year. Reassure them that everything is going to be okay.

 

Since we gleefully rang in January 2020 with no idea quite what was coming for us, each New Year’s Eve has had a little bit of trepidation behind it. This year is gonna be my year?…right? Okay, but this year. This year definitely. Maybe? Just a little bit?

This has been true both personally and professionally. Raising an infant during quarantine was a huge challenge; things got both easier and harder when he started preschool and we began playing the “which virus do we have this week?” game. We added baby #2 this Spring, and while our little family feels complete, there’s also an edge of panic in our day-to-day planning that we didn’t have before. (That appears to be pretty normal when adding a kid. They’re either unconscious or in EVERYTHING. But very sweet in either state of being.)

At school, we’ve spent the last three years learning how to swim in a tsunami: stuffing our teacher lives into tote boxes that last Friday in March, orchestrating online classes, planning totally digital content, choreographing a way to keep up with “roomies and Zoomies,” welcoming back all of our anxious selves into buildings, trying to create systems to support everyone’s adjustment back…it goes on.

Considering how many social media posts I’ve seen sharing anxiety about 2023, wrapping up the year in reassurance might not be a bad idea.

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Dear 2022 Self,

Whew. You’ve sure had a year.

There are a ton of things you’d rather never do again — deal with two car accidents in a single year, fly with a baby strapped to you in the middle seat of a Boeing 737 — but I can say, you made it. You did it. That great Robert Frost quote applies to this year in spades: “the best way out is always through.”

By going through those hard (sometimes awful) days, you earned both wisdom and strength. Sorry to say, navigating insurance in that first car accident made the second one a lot easier — the biggest frustration the second time around was how long it took for Urgent Care to complete a CT scan! There are worse things than planning professional development in an exam room. One challenging experience prepared you for the next time.

Beyond that, each of those hard days showed you just how much difficulty you can take. Of course you would get stuck needing to make a connecting flight on the babies’ first-ever plane ride; and of course the first flight would be delayed, leaving ten minutes to sprint the Dallas terminal in order to make it onto flight #2. Of course the only seats available would be half a plane apart, and yours would be between two passengers cursing their luck to be stuck next to the lady with the baby carrier.

And yet.

Everyone made it on the second plane. No one ended the flight in tears. Your seatmates thoughtfully picked up pacifiers every time they hit the ground. Though it definitely wasn’t the most relaxing air travel experience, you did survive it. (The kids even made it to bed at a less-than-entirely-ludicrous hour that evening.) The next time that you fly as a family, you have that experience to strengthen your backbone: we didn’t lose our minds entirely when it was THAT bad. We can get through (whatever minor thing is going wrong).

There was plenty of joy in 2022, too.

This was the year you learned how much toddlers love aquariums, discovered more great family activities in St. Louis, and added the last baby to your family. You climbed on rocks chasing Kid #1 with Kid #2 snoozing in a carrier; you roared at dinosaurs together at the Zoo.

At work, you finally finished organizing the book room, and passed the torch of department leadership to another phenomenal English teacher. (There’s a whole reason for passing on that role, but plenty of time for that later.) You workshopped college essays with seniors and analyzed nonfiction with sophomores. ¡Durante este año, estudiabas español y pasaste tu prueba de idioma!

You have a week of final exams coming up to watch their learning one last time, and then we’re off into second semester, when we’ll run the whole wild marathon again.

2022 firmed up the lessons 2020 and 2021 taught you about yourself; 2023 is the year to push off from that grounded confidence and fly.

We got this.

Me in 2023