your older self is begging you to enjoy right now
Recently, I learned the term "hurry sickness," the compulsive exigency to race time, to chronically chase after the Next Big Thing in hopes it would save me. (Note: We tend to confuse this with "ambition.") I'm not cynical, but I often treat the present as an obstacle to survive rather than a period to fully inhabit.
These days, I find myself mourning being nineteen. At least I was a university freshman and had no career anxiety from a shitty job market! But I was miserable at nineteen. I hated being nineteen, but now at twenty-five, I look back at this period of my life with a nostalgic tenderness that would've baffled my teen self (Another note: Memory is a stealthy editor that buries the dread and keeps the soft parts).
Which means my future self is already doing to right now. These days, I've been convincing myself I'll finally enjoy life when I start my career and run a successful newsletter and become a successful artist. I wonder if me at thirty-five will say: Remember when you were twenty-five and felt like you had all the time in the world?
There's a version of you, years from now, who would give almost anything to be back inside this exact moment. It's not a particularly beautiful moment, but it's yours and it's now, and this version of you realizes something you didn't back then: everything passes.
I’m not interested in toxic positivity, of feigning the hard parts aren't hard; but perhaps I need to let this chapter to count. The side projects slowly taking shape, the feeling I can be anything right now, the skills/experiences I’m accumulating — these are becoming the past I'll one day miss. Your older self isn't asking you to be grateful every single minute, but rather not to sleepwalk through your life, constantly waiting for more!, more!, more!.