Hindsight, 2020

Ten years ago, I started a great little tradition of writing myself birthday cards, the very first one “from Erica at age 19 to Erica at age 20.” These cards became mini time-capsules year over year, painting the picture of what my life was a year ago and expressing hopes for future me, one year later.

Everyone has been talking about how the conclusion of 2019 is not only the end of the year, but the end of the decade. This got me thinking about that habit of writing myself birthday cards: I’ve always written notes to myself one year in the future, but I’ve never written myself notes back to the past, affirming the things I was right about, wrong about, and shouldn’t have worried about.

As the year and decade reach their final hours, I was inspired to invert my own tradition and think about my life ten years ago and what present me would tell past me about the decade to come.

So here’s my note to self in the past — a decade ago.

EZ in 2009, on the brink of 2010,

When you wrote your first birthday card to yourself in 2009 to 2010. it would have been cool, if you’d also written a note-to-self in 2009 for 2019. But that’s easy for me to say now. Hindsight is 2020, after all, and you weren’t thinking about what life would look like in ten years because you couldn’t really think past what life would look like past a given semester, let alone a given day of classes.

I’m trying to remember who you were at the end of 2009 and what you thought ten years from then…