A letter from Jan 01, 2025

Dear Future Me, How are you feeling? Confident? Happy? Satisfied or troubled? You know where the answers lay. Invest in your time and yourself and practice your spiritual practices; they’re grounding, they'll keep your head on your shoulders. You should receive this shortly after New Years if not, on New Year’s Day. Something about 2024, no matter how positively i tried to look at it, just felt off. I was doubting myself at most every turn, questioning whether or not i belonged somewhere or whether i deserved to be happy and to enjoy my happiness. Something about 2024 made me so lethargic and even now, i don't really know where that came from. I was constantly putting myself on edge, saying “You SHOULD be doing this, right now. You should be doing something else, you should be productive and have your life together by now. Why haven’t you done it yet? Are you truly so useless? So behind the curve, so domicile and pathetic that you cant even feel good about what you're doing right now?” It was all defined by guilt, guilt tripping myself into trying to be productive or grounded and ending up surprised as if THAT was the way to go about it. I couldn't even allow myself to be happy, to be satisfied or content with where i was at with life. I was already expecting so much from myself when i hadn’t even explored life outside of what it means to be a young adult, living with my parents and for feeling that i was stuck in the same place as my teenage self. I really tried to make the best out of it though, i really did my best there. And in review, 2024 was not a bad year, maybe we’re just being too hard on ourselves this time around. In hindsight, i had a lot of good moments and there were many times i felt so happy, beautiful and confident in myself and my appearance. So, instead of yearning for that fleeting feeling from the past or trying to replicate a situation that occurred naturally, let’s try instead to work to maintain a feeling of confidence that we have by being intentional and DELIBERATE* in our beauty regime and self care and growth SYSTEMS*. We can do this by: Focusing on one thing at a time when we feel ungrounded, when our mind is racing and telling you that you need to be in a million places at once, when you really don't need to be. By being unafraid to start experimenting with our appearance and changing things up/ trying on new things when the situation calls for it and doing so thoughtfully. (Or reasonably impulsively, should that be necessary) And by knowing when i am allowed to invest in my appearance by trying on or buying new things to replace old items that hold emotional weight and baggage, and keeping items and trying to up-cycle or repurpose old things before deciding how i want to move forward with them Other things that we can do to feel more grounded and to deliberately make room for more things to come into life is by: Transferring all photos, videos, notes and documents onto an external hard drive and/or printing them out to scrapbook important moments and dispose of anything unnecessary Sorting through old notebooks and seeing which ones actually reflect my present mindset and seeing the work that got me here, intentionally labelling the stored items correctly to bring with me when I move. Getting rid of old items, books and other miscellaneous items by sorting through and disposing of things when necessary. 2024 taught me much, but i also know what needs to be left behind. Let’s see what 2025 has in store for us. Love, always and godspeed, -P