A Letter From My 16-Year-Old Self
On my 26th birthday, I received an email from myself - written in 2010.
It was delivered to me by a service called Futureme.org - on their website you can write an email to yourself (or anyone) and have it be delivered whenever you like in the future.
It was a delightful surprise. Here it is, with certain slightly personal bits redacted (you see, I don’t know how younger Jack would feel about some of being public, forgive me):
I like how I had nothing really but questions, most of which are leading and hilarious to me.
Training - striving to improve your body, or refine it for a task - continues to be a big part of my life. Back then, at 16, I was a few years into rowing and martial arts. It had a huge impact on me, and I suppose I knew how important it would be going forward.
My Chemical Romance - since writing the email, they broke up and got back together again, and they even had a world tour planned. Despite my attempts, I didn’t get tickets. While I’ve branched out a bit, I still enjoy their music from time to time.
Early on scepticism about marriage still remains.
Concerns about finding a passion and something which I enjoy (I suppose, if anything, I’ve found too many).
Wondering how Naruto ends - for those of you who don’t know, Naruto was a manga serialised in Weekly Shonen Jump in Japan for about 16 years. It was about ninjas. It was great = but more importantly, acted as a gateway for me into Japanese culture and the world of manga more broadly, the latter of which is a big interest of mine.
With regards to the physicist comment - I recall that at the time, I had this image of most physicists being stuck in the back of a laboratory doing experiments they weren’t really engaged with. I think I had recently met a few quite disenchanted scientists and was worried that I would suffer the same fate. I.e. - I wanted to be a physicist, but not become like the ones I had met.
Ultimately all of this has me thinking that, at our core, maybe we know ourselves better than we might expect. I didn’t write much, but most of what I wrote was right on the money. Or maybe I’m just biased, I don’t know.
In the last few years, I’ve been getting much more into journaling as not only a practice of remembering more fully but also for anxiety relief. In a sense, when I write I am not just writing for myself then and there, but also for the myself of tomorrow. Getting into that habit has been wonderfully useful to me. I only wish that younger me had written a little bit more directly about himself.
Though I do have another window - which you, dear reader, might also have access to.
Chat logs.
I’ve been on Facebook for well over a decade, and every message (bar the ones I’ve deleted, I would hope) is stored on the platform.
Thankfully for us, we can download all of this data - if you go to settings you can access this page:
From there you can download everything - posts, messages, photos. The works.
Open up that messenger file in a browser and go nuts for nostalgia, and cringe beyond belief.
In the meantime, I’m going to head once more to Futureme.org, and write a little bit more about me this time to the next future Jack.