Letters from my younger self

Image by NomeVisualizzato from Pixabay

My eldest sister handed me a small batch of letters yesterday.

I’d written them to her between November 1980 and March 1981, during my first year at university. I was studying for a degree in English Literature, and she was doing teacher training. Both of us were experiencing romantic troubles.

My sister doesn’t know why she kept the letters – she had unearthed them unexpectedly, as can happen when you’re rummaging through some obscure corner in the house – but she said how much she liked them and how well written they were.

I began reading them with some trepidation – not that there’s any insurmountable trauma in my past, but I felt disconcerted at the thought of encountering my 18-year-old self after a gap of some 44 years, especially my 18-year-old self suffering from a broken heart.

I needn’t have worried. I liked my younger self. Goodness, she sounded so very young, and naïve in some ways. But she was articulate and expressive. My sister was right: I knew how to write good letters. One would of course hope that any budding writer would know how to write good letters …

In the first letter, my younger self expressed dismay at Ronald Reagan’s election as the US President. (My politics haven’t changed much since then.) She was also very worried about a friend at Leeds University, as that wicked man Peter Sutcliffe had just murdered his final victim. In the final letter, I was moved to read a conversation with my parents while I was home during the Easter 1981 break: our family church was imploding, and I told Mum and Dad how frustrated I was with both warring factions. I wrote to my sister, “Both sides are polarised – they just can’t seem to forget their doctrinal differences and treat each other as brothers & sisters (sic) in Christ’s family. What does quibbling over doctrine matter compared to friendship and fellowship?”

My convictions on that point haven’t changed at all.

As for my broken heart, suffice to say it was a steep learning curve. Like watching a church implode.

But back to the future … have you ever read letters from your younger self? How did you feel? Have you incorporated a sense of recovering and claiming your past into your writing? Even if memoir is not your thing, it’s important, I believe, to embrace the ‘you’ you were, to embrace the child you were, the young person you were, with your whole life ahead of you, to accept yourself with all your human foibles and your capacity to learn from them. We can see how God weaves a tapestry out of our messy lives, and explore the raw materials of memory in our writing.

I’m a Licensed Lay Minister in the Diocese of Rochester. I wrote a devotional for the anthology Light for the Writer’s Soul, published by Media Associates International, and my short story ‘Magnificat’ appears in the ACW anthology Merry Christmas Everyone.