Dear Me
After years and years of buying courses and books that I hoped would give me answers, I finally found a mentor who speaks my language.
And it’s me.
Not me right here and now - this version of me is still a wide-eyed novice when it comes to this ‘third act’ stuff - but Wild Old Woman me.
As is often the case during the course of a year, I’ve fallen out of the practice of journaling. When I write, I write in the early morning before the loudness of daily living demands my attention. Lately my mornings have been mostly about fending off migraine pain, or just giving in to it, and I’ve missed putting pen to paper. So, how to tempt myself back to the page? I decided to write to myself, but my 80 year old self. I know assumptions are being made there but I’m good with it.
Who is she? What’s she doing with her time? What has she learned and what does she currently believe? Is there anything she can confidently say she knows? What advice can she give me on where to go next? What should I be sure to do?
But it’s deeper than that. I think there are infinite versions of 2043 me and I’d like to be more proactive in which one I get to embody. If possible, I’ll avoid the one who lives under a bridge; the one who falls at 79, breaks a hip and can’t get up, ultimately only just making 80 before I’m a goner, and the one who hides in her home, too scared to venture out.
My WOW self is canny. She doesn’t suffer fools but she has an open heart. She’s learned the songs of the More Than Human. She is deeply entwined with the cycle of the land where she lives. She loves; really loves. She knows life is both ugly and beautiful and understands the package deal. She is devoted to the Earth.
I believe that if I can find her (I’m hoping her address is still the same as mine), this WOW version of me who has profoundly deepened her relationship with the rest of the natural world, can guide me in to her fireside, landmark by landmark. I’m asking for directions, and it isn’t some untested daydream, “fingers crossed” kind of deal. I’ve done this before, in reverse.
1985 was a rubbish year. In late ‘84 my aunt and I left our work in Germany to come home and support her parents/my grandparents through what we hoped would be an effective period of medical and surgical treatment for one of them. We lost my grandfather in the first days of ‘85. My grandmother made it to the last days of the same year. Around the six month mark, other family members finally stepped up and took over responsibility, leaving us to stagger off, glassy of eye and broken of heart, to rediscover our lives. In effect, they no longer existed; we each needed to build from the ground up.
So it was that I found myself living in a small room with a shared kitchen and bathroom, at 6 Cleveland Place in Bath. If you’re local, it was just down from The Curfew, by the traffic lights at the top of London Road, by Cleveland Bridge. I got a job waitressing at a little restaurant overlooking the weir and Pulteney Bridge (oh, I just found this guy who was the son of my landlord - I lived above their family home and he was just a kid at the time. He came to work at the same restaurant, and then another where I was Asst Manager…memories…).
Where was I? Bath. Waitressing. Bedsit. Somewhat numb. Then I fell in love and kicked off five years of absolute emotional misery. Happy days! Moving swiftly on, at the end of those five years I was at yet another restaurant, this time as Manager.
One evening, my boss informed me he’d hired a temporary barman. A guy who was well known in the city’s catering circles, having managed our main rival, but was leaving the trade to work for an airline. He had a few weeks to fill so he was helping us out. I decided right away this loser was just going to mansplain my job to me and I wasn’t having any of it. When he walked in, I buried my head in an order book and ignored him. After a few minutes of saying hello to everyone else, he walked behind the bar where I was sitting, stood opposite me and said,”Hi, I’m Charlie.” I looked up, straight into his eyes, and heard in my head, “Oh there you are”. Closely followed by, ”Oh shit.”
Dear reader, I married him. But not until 35 years later (after 23 together). But our time was not then. We were briefly friends with insane chemistry; I was besotted but both emotionally wiped out and accepting of circumstances, and we went our separate ways for 12 years.
I’ve often wondered where that “Oh there you are” came from. I’m agnostic when it comes to reincarnation so sort of ruled that out. Sort of. I really had no solid explanation.
Until recently.
Our daughter has a job in Bath and each Sunday we take her to, and pick her up from, the premises on Walcot Street. To get there we drive past my old room. Waiting at the traffic lights, I can see my 1985 window. Just as a joke, I started calling out to 22 year old me, lying in that room wondering how it had all gone so wrong. “Hang in there,” I said. “You’re a late bloomer and things get way better. You’re going to meet him in about five years but the rest will take a while. His name is Charlie Moores. Keep your eyes open!” Over the months, variations of this became a habit. It took me way longer than it should have to realise…that’s why the “Oh there you are”. I’d got the bloody message.
There’s further evidence that 2001 me got through to 1997 me on the same topic but that’s another story and I’ve bent your ear (eye?) for long enough.
Now here I am, writing to 80 year old me. Instead of just receiving, and hoping I remember in 17 years time that I need to reach out, I’m attempting to instigate that conversation. I reckon that if I keep trying, eventually she’ll reply. I don’t want to risk not being her. This late bloomer is ready to become the wild flower she’s meant to be.
I’d love to hear if you’ve ever had something like this happen. A message from another you, somewhere in time. If you haven’t ever done it, I recommend giving it a go. I don’t think geographical proximity is necessary, just intention. Which you would you “call”? What would you tell them? What have you been told?
Remember to listen.
I know that view so well! Great story. So often we get what we want AND need. ❤️
Yes! Similar, anyway, and in those same crisis years. Also weirdly, from the cottage at West End. I've dug this up from an old blog post, and heavily edited:
" [ circa 1993…] I was working in a stable in Berkshire - it was a temp job, I was as it turned out, at the end of my globe trotting, and in the throes of coming home - and it was nearly Christmas. I was pretty lonely. I had been travelling for years, and I was rootless and sad, and the people I was working with were not too pleasant. I was a bit of a mess, I drank too much, and ate too little, slept too little and spent all my money on useless things .... but I was 'OK'!
Well, one day, I had a day off and I decided to go Christmas shopping to Oxford. It was a longish bus ride, but I didn't have anything else to do, so off I went. I spent a long, cold afternoon shopping. I was lonely and sad, and although I would be spending Christmas at my sister's house - that was a place with a lot of bad, sour, memories for me. I was starting a new job in the New Year - but I didn't yet know that it would be my last job with horses, and the one where I met my husband .... that was all in the future.
The light was fading, it was a grey day, a day of cold, dank, freezing fog - the bus journey was a bit alarming in poor light, on bad roads, and about half way home, we passed a village green, and back beyond the green, there was a line of cottages.
They weren't spectacular, or unusual, nor even picturesque. Just a line of one time farm labourers cottages, mid nineteenth century, not old, or thatched, or specially pretty. But they caught my eye, and from one of the middle ones, emanated light, and warmth, and some sense of activity and security.
Now I can't remember if I prayed - I could have done, it was a routine way of expressing a wish to get my own way! - or if I was in one of my more new age phases, and I visualised, or affirmed - but if I prayed, what I would have said was, God, please, I want to be on the inside! I'm so tired of being out here alone. I want to be in there. Just like that. With lights on, and baths running, homework being done, food cooking, people living and loving .... let me be on the inside.
As I said, my next job took me to meet my husband [...] and about three and a half years ago, we moved into this rented house, on a farm, and here we seem to have settled [...]
There's just one thing that isn't so great about our house, and though I can live with it, it does annoy [Neil] and that's the proximity of the main road which runs behind our house. Although we are on country lanes, we have a big road a field away behind us, which hums with traffic night and day.
We'd been here over a year, before it clicked. We're on a bus route. Travelling on a grey day, from Swindon, you would look down across the field, and see a line of cottages, nestled in a dip. And on such a cold winter evening, in ours, you would see light, and warmth, bustle and love. "