i hope this finds you well started as a comprehensive book of general advice and ended up as a terribly niche one. When I first started writing it, I kept thinking about how much I hated hearing what happy people had to say about depression. In that vein, how could I claim to have advice for people whose lives I don’t know? As if I have some insight they don’t... I decided to focus on the only person I really truly know well enough to give advice to- me.



Thing is, I don’t know me either. I don’t feel a deep connection to my past self or memories or even much of a connection at all. I started flipping through old journals and keepsakes for topic ideas and came across a letter I had written at age 12 to my “future self”. I didn’t need to try to remember what I was thinking or feeling or worrying about, I had all these old letters and emails to myself telling me what I was scared of. What I was unsure of. What I was dreaming of.



Since I was young, I was fascinated with the idea of sending notes and letters to the future. I made countless time capsules that would be subsequently lost in moves, entrusted letters with teachers that would- mostly- not ever be mailed to a current address, wrote endless notebooks full of thoughts that would be tossed unceremoniously. In part, I was outsourcing self love to a future version of me- I couldn’t love myself, but maybe someday I would be someone who did. I didn’t approve of myself, maybe the future would. And if the future didn’t- maybe he would forgive me, remembering my humanity at the time. In part, I was willing myself to make it through to the future, because I had to be there, reading these letters and looking back.



As I wrote this piece, I kept adding new letters. And I had to come to terms with the idea that I would be putting some of these internal thoughts and feelings into the universe while they were still relevant to me. Reading a letter I wrote at 14, over half my life ago, isn’t embarrassing because I was 14! All 14 year olds are embarrassing, they’re supposed to be. But this tape has a voice memo I recorded to myself at age 30, still talking about being afraid of the future, just for different reasons.



I wanted to scrap the tape. I wanted to at least scrap the last half. I felt so ashamed and overdramatic for being so uncertain about the future so recently. The year I started writing this tape (2022), there were 174 anti-trans bills introduced in the United States. In 2023, there were 588... for that and many other reasons, I’m still apprehensive about the future. But like every other time I was afraid, I can’t be defeated by it. I didn't make it through everything I did to be defeated by this.



Working on this project has been both difficult and healing at every step of the way. Listening to recordings of your voice can be weird enough- but yourself repeatedly confronting your greatest discomforts? I'm not sure if I reconciled parts of my past because I genuinely worked on myself or because I effectively created a self hypnosis tape.



I think I said it best in an essay I wrote at age 16:



"I swung back and forth between loathing and hope, but what kept me alive was the passion I had for my words. The beauty I saw in my composition even when the thought was ugly, kept me wanting to make something better. I wanted to write something that wasn’t based off of pain; something that was based off of acceptance and love. ... I hope my writing can affect others who need it someday; I believe in the power of words."



love,

Erik Tinsley

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