mei's diary

dear future me

I've been writing myself yearly birthday letters since I was 13. I got my one from last year today. I wanted to share it because it's probably not my best birthday letter - disjointed and written way too late and generally fraught - but it was a good representation of how I was last year, and is still worth saving.

Some stuff has obviously been omitted or changed.

Dear 25!Me,

EEK. I'm so sorry – this is coming at you like... not even a pregnancy's length of time ago. I'm basically you at this point. But here's my check-in anyway.

Today is November 30, and I'm going to be doing a breakout room with my friends in about 30 minutes. (I was mad yesterday because someone had to back out last minute, but that's... god, I hope I'm less angry as a person next year. Am I?) Speaking realistically, I will probably stop writing to you after this paragraph so I can head out already. But I'm worried when I get back I'll be too tired to continue writing. I think starting is the hardest part though, so we'll see.

December 1

Okay, it's tomorrow now. I think one of the reasons I was so reluctant to start writing my letter to you this year was that my birthday felt... underwhelming. For some reason I was sad and just super not feeling it, even though it was a fine day. This whole year has been not excellent, actually. But I wanted the email I wrote to be a happy one, so it could inspire you. I've been putting it off writing it this long but haven't seen that big an uptick in my general demeanor or the state of things, so I might as well write it anyway.

December 7

Sorry this letter is so disjointed. It's kind of a nice metaphor for my general mental state this year though LOLLL.

So. What was my year of being 23 like?

Careerwise—

I was working at the school pretty consistently for most of the year. I applied to another school and then had a nightmare of a time when they told me I was hired THE DAY BEFORE CLASSES STARTED so I dipped out of there.

I also applied kind of on a whim to a program abroad and got a response from the hiring manager that was encouraging. He said he would love to hear from me again once I got my teaching certificate, so I enrolled in a program in March. So I was doing those two things, alongside, of course, still drawing - so that was my third thing. (I was working on my zine and some commissions, I believe?)

I applied to teach online after some months doing lessons with my Korean tutor. She'd asked me to tutor her for a bit and I did so for free lol but she recommended I apply and I wanted to SO I DID. I got rejected the first two times and got in finally in late March. So four things. My motivation to continue with the school dipped around then, and then the bombshell happened.

I took a break from the school and the certification in May/Juneish, and kept teaching online but eventually took some breaks from that as well before stopping completely when I had an existential crisis and started at my corporate job in September of this year.

Fandomwise—

Between my last letter (September) and now, I've been into:

Misc—

And then life—

. . .

December 20

Dear me of 25 years,

I think you know how hard a year this was. I couldn't even bring myself to compose a proper birthday letter to you (even if we already decided to do short update letters rather than big literary endeavors) before the last month of the year. Our birthday was hard and underwhelming; so many things that were happy were tinged with an underlying grief or fear of something going wrong.

But that last thing – fear of something going wrong. You've always felt that, even before (gestures vaguely) all of this. Isn't it tiring? Aren't you tired of being worried? Don't you just want to go ape shit – or at least just let go of some of those worries? I'm talking more to myself than to you here – people say that at the age of 25 your brain kind of chills out a bit and you feel a little more sure of yourself, more stable. But just in case you don't yet, here's your yearly reminder to literally relax.

Well, I am not too far from being you. I'm nearly halfway between us, newly 24, and us, newly 25. Maybe "literally relax" is too difficult a piece of advice to put into action with only half a year before we see this letter again. But by the time I'm you, I hope we've taken a step towards that.

I wish you well. I wish our family well. I wish our friends well. I wish you well, again, just for good measure.

Love,

Mei, doing her best :•)

Before you feel disappointed by this letter, just know you still have your Twitter archive. Relax. These letters are only one of many ways you've been documenting your life, you funny archivist bitch.