Letter to future Me

Dear future Me,

I am so curious! I have so many questions! Do we have flying cars yet? Or at least self-driving cars? Did we survive the Trump years intact, or did the country utterly fall apart and have to be remade in a different form? Was he truly the worst thing, or was there something else waiting in the wings? But unless there are time machines in the future, I’m going to have to find out the slow way.

But on a more personal level, are we still alive? Are we happier now? Have we found a way to get rid of the dysphoria? How about the depression? How is our wife? Our daughter? I know, I know… same thing – I’m going to have to wait to find out.

So I guess I’ll write about my hopes and dreams, and you can reminisce about the days when you were that naive and idealistic.

I hope you’re alive. I hope you’re healthy. I hope you’re finding happiness.

I hope you and your wife are still happily married. I hope your daughter has found her way and is changing the world in her own way. I hope she made it through the teen years with minimal trauma. I hope she still loves you and still talks to you.

I hope you finished your book. And maybe a few more. I hope it found moderate success and has helped at least a few other people. I hope it helped you, too.

I hope you found your voice. Both with your vocal cords, and in saying what you need to say. I hope you found the right people to listen. I hope you never forgot to listen to other people, too; I suspect that won’t be a problem — I’m working really hard to make sure we develop and retain those skills.

I hope you have a vibrant community of chosen family; the chosen family I have is amazing, and I can only see that getting better! I hope you have an overwhelming amount of love coming your way, and that you’ve discovered a depth of love inside of yourself that I can’t even conceive of.

I hope you are comfortable in your body. I hope you’ve done enough to your body, and knew when you were finished. I hope that you have found confidence in your body; I’m trying to take better care of this body now so that it will become everything we need – I hope my efforts were successful.

I hope the world is a better place. I hope that the years I’m going through now are the bad ones – the worst ones – which will provide the context for better ones to come. I hope that the momentum I’m seeing now for increased understanding and acceptance for trans people only builds and that it didn’t take too much longer for widespread and near universal acceptance to take hold. But I’m pretty sure the struggle will still be going on, even in your time. I hope we have the resilience to rise above it and thrive anyways.

I hope that the world gets better in so many other ways, too. I hope humanity gets our act together and that we aren’t polluting ourselves into oblivion; that we’ve found a way to be sensible about gun ownership and that violence committed with guns has faded into distant memory; that we’ve solved social issues like homelessness, access to healthcare, and access to basic needs like healthy food and clean water. I hope we’ve learned how to be kind to each other.

I hope we’ve made progress to help people dealing with mental issues and illness. I don’t know that we can solve these things, but I hope we’ve removed stigma and improved support. I hope we’ve learned to recognize neuro-diversity not as problems to be solved, but as differences to be celebrated.

I hope we’ve learned to celebrate other forms of diversity – racial, cultural, differences in abilities, differences in genders, and all other forms of diversity. I hope that we’ve stopped mistreating others just because they are different.

I hope that society has found ways to motivate people other than money and power. I hope that, if money exists, it isn’t the limiting factor in most people’s lives like it is today.

I hope religion has evolved. I hope that it has fulfilled its potential for good and has abandoned all the ways it has been used to promote division, negativity, fear, and hatred. I hope you’ve found your place within it (if that meets your needs), or without it (if it does not) – and that you are at peace with it.

I hope you’ve found the answers that I’m looking for. Or if not, you’ve found a way to be at peace without those answers. I really hope this!

I hope you’ve found better questions to ask – ones driven more by curiosity than by a quest to resolve years of pain and suffering.

I hope our suffering is over. If you do have a time machine and can get a message back to me – please tell me that we’re ok, and that everything we’ve gone through and I am going through is worth it. I need this to be worth it.

I hope you’re proud of me. I’m trying really hard to be proud of myself.

I love you,

Me
(written February 10 & 11, 2020)