Future Me
Presence Vs. Prediction
(Vintage National Geographic)
Back in 2010, when at the age of sixteen I fell suddenly and dramatically ill, there was a website called Future Me that allowed you to send emails to your future self, programmed to arrive at a future date, sometimes years in the future. I just double-checked and the website still operates.
When a young person gets sick there is an expectation that their youth will pull them back into health relatively quickly. But for those of us who do not spring back into shape, that expectation can cause feelings of shame, failure, and render us illegible to the other people in our life who do not understand how a young person could get sick…and then not get better. Culturally, we do not expect puberty and mortality to coexist within the same body.
That first year of emergency room visits and doctor’s appointments, caught in a miasma of nausea, unrelenting pain, and brain fog, I banked on my ability to recover. I’d recovered from everything else during my short life, right? But midway through the year, reaching my birthday sicker than ever, I realized that maybe I wasn’t in a story I recognized. This initial narrative rupture is what begins my upcoming memoir The Body Is a Doorway. What happens when we don’t perform a standard healing narrative? Where do we go?
Unmoored from a recognizable narrative, I scrambled for something to hold onto to keep me afloat.
I started sending myself letters through Future Me. At first, at a delay of three months. And then shooting them like pixelated arrows into an inbox many years in the future.
Are you better? What worked? Can you eat easily again? How does it feel to not be in pain and to be through this ordeal? Are you better?
Arrow is the right metaphor because I was constructing weapons to pierce my future breast. Each Future Me letter wounded me with my past ignorance, with my blind hope that I might be better by next Christmas, next summer, next, next, next. And it always served as a reminder to compare my present body with my past body, harshly aware of all the capability I had lost and not recovered since the initial email had been drafted.
I sent Future Me letters. My parents turned to a psychic. But the impulse was the same. We wanted to grasp the future like a handhold in a rock face, using it to leverage us past uncertainty and pain.
Give me my Future Me. Let me accelerate through the agony of Present Me.