I found a letter I wrote to myself at 22 and I don't know what to do with it
This weekend I was cleaning out a drawer and came across a folded piece of paper I had completely forgotten about. It turned out to be from a workshop I took during my last year of college. One of the exercises was writing a letter to our future selves and sealing it away. Apparently, I never got around to sealing mine. I just tossed it in a drawer and forgot it existed for almost ten years.
What surprised me wasn't the letter itself, but how much of it was about money. I would have expected it to be full of thoughts about relationships or career goals, but most of it was 22-year-old me worrying about financial security. She kept asking future me not to end up stuck in a job she hated just to cover rent. There was even a part where she reminded me to always have a bank account of my own that my partner didn't know about. That really caught me off guard because I have no memory of thinking that way at 22.
The truth is, I'm doing well. Better than well, honestly. But I sat with that letter for a long time because most of the things my 22-year-old self was worried about have been resolved, at least on paper. And yet I still recognize the same anxiety she was describing. The circumstances have changed, but the feeling underneath them hasn't completely gone away. Has anyone else ever found something they wrote years ago and realized that a younger version of themselves had already identified something they've never fully shaken?