A letter from Sep 19, 2023

Dear FutureMe, 28th Birthday Part 1 September 18, 2023 I’m 28 and life has NOT magically gotten better. I just got my letter from my summer of Freshman year of college, and it was a bit sad. I expected so much for my 28 year old self. And yet, back then I already knew I was delusional and that there’s a chance we would just have a ****** life anyway. And he was kind of right. We’re still single. Still never been on a date. The saga with Daniels ended horribly. And now we’re crushing on Roman, another unavailable straight guy. I am living alone now, which is nice. But my ability to stay in this studio in Kips Bay is hanging by a thread. If I don’t get an 80K job in a few months, I will not be able to pay rent anymore. **** me. Am I happier? I don’t know. I guess I seem more content. I definitely have gotten clarity on my place in the world, and it has driven me to move away from civilization more so than ever before. I just want to live in the woods as a druid with my plants and animals. It’s funny. I was lamenting being fat and ugly at 227lbs and now I’m EVEN WORSE. Now I truly am fat and ugly at 267lbs. Albeit the pandemic and my masters program happened, and those didn’t help. But ironically, this email mirrored what I’m doing now. Apparently I started trying to lose weight that July and I also started trying to lose weight again THIS July. So far I’ve lost 14 pounds, but I’m probably gaining it back because of this vacation eating out twice a day with my mom. AGAIN, I’m hoping maybe this can stick. I wanna go back down to 230 hopefully by next May. But on a lighter note, we’ve accomplished some things. We finished out Masters program in public administration. We are living in a studio apartment in Manhattan. I have TWO MacBook Pros now. I JUST BOUGHT a Sony Aloha A7R IV camera last night. We’ve wanted that for years. And after 3 years of saving our money, we can finally start photography again. At this point, I’m not holding out for romance or a boyfriend. I’ve come to understand that everything about me is inherently working against or is incompatible with the concept of a relationship with another person. The amalgamation of my genetic traits, trauma responses, and experiences as an ugly fat person, has deformed me into something not salvageable. I thought it was because I was ugly that I couldn’t find love. But it goes way deeper than that. And there’s really nothing I can do now to change me. I might as well just use the rest of my time to make peace with a life by myself. And so what are my hopes for you, my 30 year old future self? We’re probably still single. THATS a given. But I hope you’ve found a better job. I found we have enough money to pay our rent. I hope our student loan payments are manageable. I hope we’ve figured out where to live after our lease in our studio ends. I hope you’ve lost weight and that we keep your routine and diet for the next year or so. And if not, if we do none of these. It’s fine. I love you for you. We may hate our selves, but we only hate our bodies and our circumstances in this life. We don’t hate our soul and our mind. I hope at the very least we’ve worked towards finding peace by ourselves and maybe expressing our feelings through our art, whether it be photography or writing or worldbuilding). Sincerely, Daryl