Dear Me: I Love You. xoxo, ~Me.

I’ve been thinking a lot about my future self lately.

Not in a grand, five-year-plan way.

More in a very specific, very practical way.

The version of me who exists tomorrow morning. Or next week. Or at 3:17 PM when something goes wrong and I’m already a little fried.

That future me is doing their best.

I know that because they’re me.

And I keep realizing how often I make their life harder without meaning to.

Not out of spite.

Just out of tiredness, avoidance, or the quiet belief that I’ll “deal with it later.”

Later always arrives.

So I’m trying to shift how I think about care.

Not as something I do to feel good right now, but as something I do to reduce stress for the person I’m about to become.

Loving my future self looks boring.

It looks like answering the email instead of letting it hover ominously in my inbox. It looks like putting the thing away instead of setting it down “for a second.” It looks like checking the calendar and noticing conflicts before they become emergencies.

None of these things are fun in the moment.

They don’t deliver dopamine.

They don’t feel like self-care.

But they create relief.

And relief is wildly underrated.

When I do these small, preventative acts, I can almost feel future me exhale.

Like I’ve left them a glass of water on the nightstand.

Like I’ve cleared a path they didn’t even know they’d need.

Sometimes I imagine future me opening a door and being surprised that it’s unlocked.

That’s the feeling I’m going for.

This isn’t about optimizing every second or turning life into a checklist. It’s about reducing friction. About smoothing out the sharp edges so my nervous system doesn’t have to stay on high alert all the time.

Loving my future self also means knowing when not to overdo it.

If I try to prepare for every possible scenario, I just end up exhausting present me, which creates a different kind of stress later.

There’s a balance.

A sweet spot between care and control.

So I’m learning to ask a simple question: will this make future me’s day easier or harder?

If it’s easier and the cost to present me is reasonable, I try to do it.

Not perfectly.

Not always.

Just often enough that future me starts to trust that I’ve got their back.

Because future me is going to wake up inside the consequences of today’s choices.

I want them to feel supported, not sabotaged.

I don’t need to be a hero to my future self.

I just need to be considerate.

And honestly, that feels like a very doable kind of love.