A letter from Jan 02, 2023

Dear future self, I’m James, and currently, I’m studying at The American School of Vietnam. This is my last year of high school, and next year I will be moving to Canada to continue my studies at my university. This year has been a wonderful year, I have had a lot of happy moments talking with my teacher and friends I have been with for over 4 years. This year, I had been feeling many negative emotions about myself. I alway worry about what I will be in the future. So, right now, this is a letter that I will be sending to my future self in the next 2 years. I will tell you about my mind tracker in the first part of the letter. In my mind tracker, I often think about my future. I wanna know whether I am gonna be rich or poor in the future and where am I gonna stand. I also write in my note about whether the path that I’m choosing right now is a bright path or is it just some kind of a motivation for me to keep going forward to achieving what I always wanted. Everyone has many negative feelings and even positive emotions when they think about this same kind of mind tracker as me. I had been going through a lot of bad things and even a lot of worse things that I never thought about. I felt very sad and couldn't do anything to make myself happy or even feel better. I never thought that I would think about this that often until now. I was dwelling into this because my parents forced me to do it. They said that they wanted me to have a bright future, but they said that I must remove everything that cannot motivate me. I have a very healthy relationship with my girlfriend, and they force me to remove her and delete all of the texting apps that can be used. After I heard that I was completely falling into a dark box with all 4 sides black, I immediately thought, what if I hangling my neck through the rope? Will they allow me to continue this relationship because she is the one that alway motivates me instead of using words to say something bad about me like my family. After all, I have learned many things from my mind tracker that no one can motivate you, even your parents, but the one that can motivate you and tell you to choose the brighter path is the one that you love the most. You can remove all of the texting apps and social media out of your phone and even your contact with everyone, but only one thing is that you never can’t delete the want to love because that person is someone who is always on your side and motivates you. Even if both of you are far in distance, your heart is very close. I have a lot of stress that comes from school, parents and relationships, but mostly my stress comes from my parents. They are the ones that make me feel stressed because they alway talk to me using words that affect me and the people around me. I never think that I will forgive my parents for whatever they did to me over the years, this pain is the pain that not everyone can feel normally. This pain had been smack right into my heart and my feelings. It is really hard to remove it because the problem that they did was affecting my future and also affecting everyone that has a close relationship with me. They alway abuse the power of their friend to be a chief in police. As I mentioned above, they force me to remove everything from my phone and even my lover. They said that if you don’t do it, I will ask for help from my friend to force them to not get close to me. This stress caused me a heart attack. My heart beat reached the highest at the number of nearly 200. Next, I will tell you about what can make me overcome the 3 stresses above, and the risk factor that has always been a challenge for me. As I already mentioned many times above, because of the problem that my parents did to me caused me a lot of stress. The only protective factor that has been helping me and motivating me is my girlfriend. Even when my parents asked me to remove her from my contact, I still secretly hid her in there with a different name. It actually did support me to overcome the stress a lot because I got the biggest motivation from the one that I love the most. Finally, to deal with this problem, I have many stress management strategies to help me overcome, which are playing with my lovely dog, and sharing the stress with the one that alway by my side. To me, these current methods are very effective because every time I get the same stress like that. These two strategies are always helping me to overcome and making me feel better and happier. In my health teacher's class, I study the 89 self care strategies, but it is not that effective to me because there are three most effective strategies that have been helping me over and over again. And these strategies will also help me overcome future sources of stress, which are sharing the stress with the one I love, doing meditation for over 30 minutes, and taking a deep nap for 5 to 7 hours to reduce the stress out of your body and your mind.