Around 7th or 8th grade, I decided to keep a journal. It didn't take me long to figure out that writing with any regularity was pretty difficult, and just discussing day-to-day stuff didn't often give me a clear picture of what life was actually like right then. It was too easy to overlook the significance of commonplace events in favor of describing events that deviated from the everyday routine. After writing occasionally for a year, reading my earlier entries was already painful. Between my enthusiasm for earnesty and my appalling tendency to announce intentions which would never pan out, I was too busy cringing to read much of what I'd written. Journals are more beneficial to write in than to read.
I knew that I'd want records of what my life was like, though, and since I felt like memory alone wasn't really enough get the job done, I'd start writing letters to my future self. The object was to write them at regular intervals: often enough to avoid missing any major events in my life, but not so frequently that I fell into the traps of journal-writing. I decided the best possible interval was a three-month span of time. One season. That would mean I was writing quarterly: shoot for somewhere around New Year's, my birthday (March 29), the 4th of July, and my half-birthday (September 29).
What actually happened was that I only ever wrote one letter to myself. After that first one, I kept missing deadlines and forgetting about the project. I
planned to start doing that again here on livejournal, but I can't remember whether I ever did, and I'm sure as hell not going through my old entries to find out. They're just as unreadable as my first journal.
That's the preamble. Over the last couple weeks, my parents have been trying to clean the house out of our accumulated junk. I've been helping by bringing things I might want to keep over to my apartment with Julie. I started by bringing my old debate file box, thinking it would be useful for archiving work documents and bank statements. I'd have to go through it first, of course, and in the middle of a stack of roleplaying character sheets and plans for a never-finished Neverwinter Nights module, I found that first letter. The note said I wasn't supposed to read it until September of 2011, but I figured 12 and a half years was long enough to wait.
( That letter reads as follows. )![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
