Today, I feel inspired to write to the you that lives 5 years ago.
To some, this may seem impossible, but it’s only a matter of time before this email reaches them.
Ever got caught in a cloud of the cheap perfume of a passerby, because the scent happened to be the same one your high school sweetheart used to wear?
If so, I bet you immediately felt 14 again.
Ever noticed how songs are kinda like bridges that connect various pasts to the present for everyone? And how particularly potent melodies or lyrics can bring up feelings from many different phases and eras at once?
I think these are more than just memories. They are little cues that knock on the door of your psyche and ask if a younger you is in there.
A knock that is usually answered, too.
Triggers are exactly the same thing. Songs are triggers. Scents are triggers. They temporarily ask old selves to come out and play.
(You can even consciously engineer this. I once took MDMA at a festival. And at the peak of the trip, I felt so good that I decided to create a “save state”. Holding my hands in a specific way and looking at them until I had created a visual trigger.
For years, while others drank to let loose, I just fired the trigger and loaded the me from the festival.)
I don’t mean this metaphorically, by the way. I believe your younger you’s are still inside you. I’ve seen it.
For example, if you pay attention to people’s voices when they get triggered into a very old trauma response, you may notice something:
Their voice tone shifts to that of a little kid. Almost like the kid is speaking through the adult body.
And I think it is.
After all, the adult is not the one going through something traumatic. It’s the kid who still needs help back then.
Like a tree, your psyche grows in concentric circles. Each new age forming a new layer around the previous ones
So in a sense, you’re always every age you’ve ever been simultaneously.
The oldest age being most visible because it’s physical.
But the others are still alive and reacting to everything as well
The mature version of you isn’t the one that abandons previous, immature versions.
It’s the one that both contains and transcends every previous you you’ve ever been.
If a tree would shed all the inner rings each time it grows a new outer one, it would remain fickle forever.
The goal isn’t for the adult self to replace the child self. As that only leads to a deep sense or self-abandonment that we can’t notice (because we’re the ones doing the abandoning).
But its also not to decide it’s time to connect with our inner child, let it run the show, reverse our progress and once again become unsocialized and irresponsible.
It’s to capture the wonder, curiosity and innocence of child-you, the testiness of the teen-you, the adventurous energy and life-force of your twenties, the commitment of your 30s…and whatever comes after (I haven’t reached that level yet)…while also giving yourself the chance to bug-fix any version of you with stunted or kinked development by taking good care of them.
—Wait what?—
Yes, taking good care of them…because they’re still here.
The fact that a trigger can make us feel like a 5 year old having a highly specific moment, to me, indicates that moment is still happening. After all, aren’t you experiencing it?
I spent only a few months in California 2 decades ago, but my soul still echoes its songs.
There are friends I haven’t seen in years (some alive, some dead) but I can smell their presence in the summer air.
And there are versions of me still gazing in the eyes of people I’ve only known for a day.
Every moment is forever.
There’d a me who is eternally staying up all night with Ari in our first bed.
There’s a me who is eternally writing funny poem’s in Ward’s kitchen after band rehearsals.
There’s a version of me eternally suffering and eternally blissful.
There’s a version of me forever telling every lie and every truth I’ve ever told.
And since we all interact with each other, in that sense the mutual impact of our behavior is eternal too.
That is strange to think of. My bad mood. My kind compliment. My response to you or lack thereof.
In each moment I am all of that, and you are the you who responded to it or witnessed each version of me you’ve met. And I am my impression of you and reponse to that. It never ends.
It’s something we ought to hold sacred, when we can. That the way we impact each other is eternalized too.
This alone is a reason to always strive and be better people in this web of interconnectedness. And at the same time, it makes everything so big and permanent that I can’t think of anything more logical than approaching all of us with forgiveness.
After all, pretty much nobody can get this perfect. But when we don’t it’s always a lack of awareness. When we are truly aware of what we’re doing, we honor this.
But I digress, my point is, these next days, I invite you to stay in touch with these past selves.
Can you notice their presence inside you at various moments?
Can you notice what they need…and what they have to offer?
(Side note: the risk of touching something taboo, what if dementia is those various selves who live in you beginning to blur too much too early, before they eventually collapse? And the reason memory stops working is because for proper functioning, it needs our experience of time to be linear?)
Since all of this is possible…since therapists are literally out there teaching people to help their hurt inner children…could a future you be out their helping their inner now-you, at some point in the future?
A good friend is on TV in a gameshow that was recorded 2 months ago.
So now we’re watching every day rooting in the present for a guy in the past, and I wonder if that guy could feel that already.
In the past I have spent many nights imaging I was talking to a future me for advice, and now I am that guy.
Maybe future you has reverse memories in the form ox today-you’s wishes?
You have access to all these different versions of you, past present, and maybe even potential futures. The question in each moment is, which one do you choose to express?