For my first post of the new year, I’m bringing you into the most personal part of my brain and sharing my letter to my end-of-2024 self. In the past, I’ve written these letters to my future self at the start of a new year and it’s been a great way to set realistic intentions that go beyond surface level. It’s been a practice that’s inspired me to think more deeply about how I want to feel and who I want to be at the end of the year. I skipped this tradition last year, and as I talked about in my last mini podcast, I missed it quite a bit. So this year, I’ve decided to bring it back.
One quick note to mention that I actually recorded a whole other mini podcast about this letter-writing tradition before vacation that I wasn’t able to push live last week because I was so sick. In that mini pod, I read my 2022 letter to self and I talk about what the letters have meant to me. I’ll make sure that goes live tomorrow, if you’re looking for more content (or a peek into my January 2022 psyche).
Finally, I should add that it can be a bit confusing to write a letter to your future self. You’re writing to future you, but also current you, and it’s easy to refer to the two yous as ‘we’ as well. Grammatically, it’s a bit of a mess, but I think as you read, you’ll get the idea. I hope so, anyway.
Now let’s dive in, shall we?
January 10, 2024
Dear End-of-2024 Self,
I’ll start by saying that 2023 was a bit of a doozy. Maybe by now you’ve forgotten that. Maybe 2024 has been so wonderful that all the painful moments of the year before aren’t even on your radar at all. Maybe you’ll look back on 2023 and mostly just recall the phrase “Karma is the guy on the Chiefs coming straight home to me,” and also that one scene from Satlburn that’s burned into your psyche like a cattle brand. I’m sure that 2024 will have its hard moments too, and maybe those will make 2023’s road bumps seem small in comparison. If there’s anything that I’ve learned from the past year, it’s that the hits don’t stop coming just because you feel like you’ve had your fair share of them already. There’s no such thing as life owing you a break, even though that exact sentiment passed my mind many, many times during the last 12 months.
For most of 2023, I was moving non-stop. Going, going, going. If I wasn’t writing, I was working on the house. If I wasn’t doing either of those things, I was triaging the various missteps and hardships that seemed to keep showing up out of nowhere. Driving for days to funerals. Canceling trips because of unexpected injuries. Re-writing a 70,000-word draft of a book by memory. Trying to stay sane when all those things somehow overlapped at the same time. I wrote in my five-year journal in January 2023 that I wanted to settle this year. Settle, settle, settle, I wrote. And then I just kept running in circles for 12 months straight, trying to catch my breath. I think I thought that if I just kept moving, that eventually all that effort would make things easier. It may not have felt like it at the time, but in retrospect I see what I was really doing, which was something more like waiting.
I kept waiting for a momentary lapse in the chaos to land neatly on my doorstep. A gift from the universe that I believed I was owed. I fantasized about having four or six or eight uninterrupted weeks of boring, inconsequential life events. No storms with 100-mph winds arriving out of nowhere. No trees falling on our house. No freak injuries from scalding hot coffee. No death. When the calm didn’t arrive, I got angry and bitter. Nothing was going how I wanted it to go. Peace and quiet were nowhere to be found. I kept messing up. I kept treading water. I kept waiting for a break and getting angry when it didn’t arrive. I had spent so long feeling so comfortable and in control in Philly, and suddenly it felt like everything was new and wrong and hard. But this was the life I dreamt of. When you get the life you dreamt of, it’s not supposed to feel like adjustment, I thought. It’s supposed to feel natural. You’ve been preparing for it for years, after all. Imagining it. Carving out each detail in your brain. It didn’t matter that every aspect of my life had changed all at once, I thought, because it’s supposed to be easy. It would be easy to anyone else, I thought. It would be something to be grateful for. What was wrong with me?
And even as I write this, I feel guilty in the same way I felt guilty for all of 2023. Who am I to complain? Who am I to feel bad? It’s pathetic, I’d tell myself. You’re pathetic, I’d tell myself. And then I’d feel angry all over again. Angry at myself, at the world, at the way it all seemed to be spinning out around me. I kept having the urge to shake life by the shoulders, force it to be better. Force me to be better. To be happier and more grateful. It’s only now that I wonder now how differently it all would have felt if I had just taken a moment to take care of myself instead.
So that’s my goal for us in 2024. I realize now that life doesn’t really owe us slowness or gentleness or calm. But we do owe those things to ourselves, I think. I want to be that way with myself in 2024, at least. I want to embrace the simple, basic things that make me feel myself and to honor them each day. Aside from writing, I abandoned so many of the things that make me feel like me in 2023 — namely, routine. I got lost. So that’s why routine is my first major goal for us in 2024. Morning reading. Exercise. Being outside. Not giving my phone so much damn control of my life, my brain, my habits. It’s not complicated, but I let it all feel that way in 2023. Routine is how I take care of myself. And that’s what I want for us in 2024.
There are other things I hope we accomplish in 2024. Work stuff. Book stuff. A whole list of things that I imagine will instantly cure my impostor syndrome, though I know that’s naïve. This will be the year you became a published author, and as I sit here in January 2024, I have so many dreams for that experience. Of course I do. I have even more fears. I could write all of those out, but you know them. Just flip to any entry in the last three years of your five-year journal and you’ll see them spelled out. Instead, what I’ll say is that I hope you read this in 12 months and you find you honored the one goal I have for us in 2024 when it comes to writing: Let gratitude win over comparison. Every time. Even when it feels impossible. Before we go down the rabbit holes of criticism and self-doubt and comparison, I want us to at least start with acknowledging the wild, incredible, life-affirming gift that is writing for a living. Not just books, but on Substack. On Instagram. Everywhere. You write every single day. You write for a living. You are a writer. An author. It’s the most magnificent, incredible, overwhelming gift. Even now, when I start from there, the comparison spirals seem a little less suffocating. A little less consequential. So I hope that in 2024, no matter what happens with publishing your first book or selling the second, I hope that you lean into gratitude for the magic which is living a life filled with writing.
Naturally, I have a vision for when you read this in January 2025. You are sitting in your newly renovated writing cottage/office. There is a wood-burning stove crackling in the background. The floors are no longer covered with dirt. The wasps are gone. The skunk, too. The walls look like walls. There are windows everywhere. Maybe it’s snowing outside, everything hushed and covered in white. You are surrounded by art and words and books that inspire you. And maybe you’ve sold another book. Maybe you’re working on something else. Maybe Such a Bad Influence was a success by every standard or just a few. I could tell you all the exact parameters and goals that I hope for, but I know it’s not that important. What is important is that you can look back on the last 12 months and know that through it all, you took care of yourself. You set the boundaries that make you feel like you and you honored them relentlessly. Not because life suddenly got easier, but because you simply chose to be kind to yourself instead of the alternative. You learned to give yourself a break instead of waiting for life to hand you one. You realized that’s what you deserved.
I believe in you. Now let’s go do the damn thing, shall we?
January 2024 Olivia
A portion of January’s subscriber proceeds will go toward Save the Children to support its work in providing essential services and support to children affected by violence in Israel and Gaza.
I just love you and your writing so much! This resonated so perfectly for me I could have written it myself (albeit much less lyrically and eloquently) and in fact if I read some of my past journal entries I probably did. BRB off to write my future self a letter...
Loved this so much! I had big plans to get into a routine beginning of the year and it’s not going well. This was what I needed to say it’s ok I’m not there yet and start over tomorrow. Question about your letter. Do you read it throughout the year or do you not look at it again until January 2025?