The letter that arrived the other day was a mystery.
There was no name, just a handwritten address in a town in Michigan my husband and I had never heard of, and a yellow sticker reading “Return to Sender.”
But the return address – also with no name — was ours.
Perplexed, we put it back in our mail slot for the letter carrier to pick up and deliver to — wherever. Back it came through the slot the next day.
You hate to open someone else’s mail. But this letter seemed to have been sent from our house. And how else could we figure out where it was supposed to go?
My husband slit it open.
Dear Nina,
You’ll probably have forgotten this by now, but in 8th grade Mr. Walsh had us write letters to ourselves … It is January 4, 2005.
My daughter Nina, who turns 23 next month, laughed over the phone. Yes, she remembered the assignment. It was to write a self-addressed letter to yourself, which the teacher would put in the mail eight years later.
No, she hadn’t addressed it to our house. She had addressed it to her friend’s weekend house in Michigan, thinking my husband and I were more likely to move from our house than her friend’s parents were to part with theirs.
They sold their Michigan house years ago. We’re still here. And so was the letter, which my husband read to her over the phone.
The assignment had been to list the top 10 goals the eighth-graders thought they should have accomplished by the time they received it in the future.
There they were, goals including:
Climb a mountain. Be fluent in French. Stick my head out of the top of limo. Be in a protest march. Fall in love.
Nina had achieved five of the goals. It seems an excellent grade on an assignment that struck several adults I described it to as terrifying.
How many of us would want to be confronted by our earlier expectations? It would be as if your New Year’s resolutions came knocking on your door, demanding an accounting. Or a painfully personal performance review.
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“I would feel like such a loser,” one friend said.
But what about simply hearing from our younger selves? Would we want to open the envelope?
My older daughter loved getting a letter from her younger self, which she had written for a similar assignment from her fourth-grade teacher. It was a chatty, happy letter about who her friends were, what she liked to do after school and how much she liked bugs.
When it arrived in the mail when she was graduating from high school, as promised by her teacher, she read it with delight she still remembers at 25. “It was such a surprise,” she said. “It was just hearing this voice of yourself from the past.”
Decades further along in life, however, it’s a different question.
If grown-ups wrote letters to our future selves, our missives would probably lack a certain bug-loving charm. We could make up for it in serious contemplation of life and discussion of various hopes and fears, but it might not make for pleasant reading.
The appeal of these youthful letters is in marveling at how much the writer has changed. How much change would adults get to wonder at? Eight years is an eternity in a child’s life, but in an adult’s life, it’s just eight years.
Still, there is something intriguing about letter-writing through time. You can reappear at some future date, or even send yourself into the past. For a friend’s project, my older daughter plans to write a letter to herself as a girl.
As for that daunting list of goals set in the past, they may not be so painful to read in the present.
Nina saw her letter not as a challenge but as a window into the younger self who wrote it.
“There’s a kind of feeling that eighth-grade me would be disappointed that I didn’t go to an Ivy League school, but that’s all right,” she said. “It doesn’t make present-day me feel bad that middle-school Nina would be disappointed. Maybe middle-school Nina didn’t know what-the-what she was talking about.”
Besides, her father read the letter to her over the phone because she was out of town giving a presentation at an academic conference. That kind of made up for that one.
In fact, the list isn’t even the point of the exercise, said Timothy Walsh, the science teacher at Percy Julian Middle School in Oak Park who gave the letter-writing assignment beginning with my daughter’s class, and has done so ever since.
It’s the change.
“They’re not going to be the same people they are today,” he said. “It’s a time capsule of who they are.”
One girl who contacted him recently after she got her letter offered confirmation. “I can’t believe how shallow I was. I’m so happy I’m not that person,” she told him.
Nina doesn’t care that she didn’t achieve all 10 goals. “What feels really nice is that I’m happier now than I thought I would be,” she said.
And the biggest goal on her list, “becoming friends with Robin,” achieving a closeness with her older sister that had at that point been elusive? She got that one.
Be brave if you like, fellow grown-ups, and write to your own future selves. If you write down goals and find you haven’t reached them, take comfort from the onetime eighth-graders.
They know that people change. Look at them: They grew into the young adults they were writing to.