I Want To Be Good To Myself, But What About My Future Self?

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I know I am loveable because I love myself. Not in the sense that you’re thinking — beautiful self-love and acceptance, which I’m working on — but in the sense of logic. Since I love my Past Self so much for having the courage to start writing my weekly blog on June 22, 2021, and the dedication to keep it up, I figure there’s something about me today that my Future Self will love one day, too.

There must be. There has to be. I don’t want to be the person today who isn’t my hero in a few years. I want to love myself then as much as I love myself now.

When I say “love,” maybe what I mean is gratitude. Huge appreciation. A feeling of “thank gawd you started such-and-such back then because life is so much better ever since you did.”

I’m divided into three people: Today Self, Future Self, and Past Self. I spend plenty of time imagining, trying to remember, and talking about Past Self. I spend lots of time musing about Today Self. But Future Self — -it’s like she doesn’t exist. At best, she’s a whisp. She’s the only one of my three selves who stands in the back of our gatherings and says nothing. She breathes so quietly you’ll never know she’s there. The other two of me ignore her most of the time. “Whatever,” we say, “If she’s not going to participate, forget about her.”

She will never participate. She’s a figment.

We’re not mean girls. Future Self is influenced by logic, too. There’s a 100% guarantee that my Past and Today selves exist. Not so for that third chick. She’s hypothetical, and no one can argue with that, least of which her. Word has it she’s been sleeping in the back of the room this whole time. I have no doubt.

But there’s another bit of logic here.

Periodically, I’ll gush to myself about myself.

“You are awesome. Thank you for starting down this road. Look how far you’ve come! I’m so grateful you decided to go for this.”

This happens when I’m thrilled with my Past Self for starting something that seemed hard, risky, scary, or like drudgery. As I sit beaming at my Past Self, I have no inkling I’m a soon-to-be Past Self right there in the chair. While the time stamps of my different selves seem so distinct, in truth, I’m one extended time warp.

Lately, I’ve become more aware of these things. I understand that Future Self is me, even if I can’t see her outline. These days, oddly, I feel more connected to her than I do to myself from the old days. I see Today Self and Future Self as two endpoints of the same dream. We see things the same — I see the potential, and she sees the progress. What comes between us is a continuum of effort, celebration, and pride. I want to make her happy. I want to make her proud of me.

But how?

Time is a blur, a concept of inching along. But I know Time. Four years from now seems like forty years but will arrive in what feels like four months. Time shrinks like wool.

These days I’m trying to sink my teeth back into exercise. I came from a long period of a lot of it — in the form of running — but I’ve retired from that, so now what to do? I go back and forth. Start and then stop. Get going and then resurrect old injuries. I was losing steam.

Then one day I picked up one of the books languishing on my pile of ADHD books I’ve been meaning to read: Spark by John Ratey, MD. It’s an oldie but goodie, a classic in the ADHD arena. It discusses how exercise is so powerful for the brain — a fact about myself I began to intuit as early as my teen years.

I have distinct memories of jogging and listening to music and knowing that this one act would make me feel less stressed and happier. We’re not talking about the ole runner’s high. We’re talking about a clear, lasting shift in mood, mental clarity, motivation, and resilience.

As the years went by, I knew to run before I went into a stressful or demanding social situation. I knew a run was my chill pill. Eventually, I started saying that I “self-medicated with running.” With decades under my belt of this cause-and-effect truth, I had no idea why this was so or that it was being studied around the world in different fields over many years.

Ratey’s book brought this back to the fore for me. Suddenly I wondered, “What will Future Self say about me when she’s feeling that old even-keel mood, clarity, motivation, and resilience?” I knew the answer. She’d be crying tears of gratitude.

For some reason, these days I can see one stunning new fact: Future Self is me. Maybe it’s my writing journey that’s become so apparent to me. I wanted to do it for so long but never did it. At one point, I watched myself say, “Well, Steph, it’s okay if you never get around to it. Right?”

Wrong!

I was not going to give up on my dream!

If this was the case, I realized only one bit of logic followed: I must start in on that dream.

I did. And the rest is history — my history. Thanks, Steph.

So, I decided to take what I knew from that time three years ago, when I put out my first blog to an empty audience.

It wasn’t that big of a deal to get to that first blog post. It was sitting down and starting. Then repeat the next day. And so on. Not rocket science. Not terror. Not complicated. Just sitting down and doing the thing.

It was easy to do because I didn’t have any giant expectations for myself other than putting a few paragraphs into a Word doc. That’s akin to showing up at the gym, working out for 30 minutes, then going home. No Olympic medals. No top draft pick. No Nike sponsorship.

The beautifully funkadelic thing about small and gradual is that, eventually, they become rote and a given. Yesterday it was “write what you can.” Today, it’s “post two stories with a cartoon every week.”

This is how I see Future Self now. I start with a dream, keep it small, no expectations. My only responsibility is to repeat — that’s it. I notice that by only caring about the repetition and not feeling like I have to love every visit to the gym, the pressure is off and I’m enjoying this new going-through-the-motions. I jam to music on the car radio on the drive there. I enjoy saying hi to the front desk staff. I devour the cuteness of all the little kids there. It’s the small, undecorated, unremarkable delights of a habit taking shape.

Each day I do this, the future no longer looks hypothetical. I’m becoming Me from a different time zone — but the time is getting closer. And gratitude is on the horizon.

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Be well, friends.