Letter to Myself; subtitled 2016

"So if you got a flame that's blazing hot within, take a deep breath and feed it oxygen."
~ Watsky, Never Let It Die

Every year I write a letter to myself to reflect my own progress as a person and to sort of have an army of past versions of myself egging me on to continue with life and not walk into oncoming traffic and to tell me that even though it was tough I made it this far so  I can make it through the next year, and I usually end it off with some stupid tagline like "Thanks for not killing off the main character of your story" which is dumb and cliche but when you're  crying so hard it feels like the veins in your forehead are going to burst and that the only thing you can, have and will ever be able to feel is sadness then stupid sentiments from past me to me help. This year I decided to post mine online as kind of a thing to say, hey, this is something you can do, even if it's dumb and cliche. There aren't really any rules and you can tell your future self anything you want, but I don't recommend writing when you're super sad. Write it when you can say something meaningful to yourself.

So anyway, here goes.

Dear Matthew

This year's been a tough one. It seemed like for every step forward, I took two steps back. Sometimes it seemed like there were more bills than money, sometimes our money seemed to disappear just as it came in. Sometimes things went right, but for the most part, they just went really wrong. Sometimes bad things happened, and they were unavoidable, and so often I got to that breaking point where I sabotaged myself out of poor self-esteem and emotional and physical exhaustion. More vividly than ever, I was reminded that willpower is an exhaustible resource but self-depreciation isn't.

Life will very often take away your belief in yourself that you can survive the harshest storms and overcome the tallest obstacles.

Life will often leave you with deadlines too close to make and fear too strong to conquer and too little direction to even start plotting a course to somewhere.

This is not weakness.

This is life.

Life throws curve balls. 

Strength of person comes from laughing at the absurd odds you beat. Strength of person comes from knowing how unfair life is, taking the blows in your strides, and getting back up after you fall. After all, it's not about how hard you can punch, it's about how many you can take and keep on fighting. And it'd take way too much time to remind you that you can take a whole lot of blows. In short, I will simply say, you survived 2016.

To the end of self betterment, I would like to ask that in 2017, we wait for the second marshmallow. Because I am nothing if not self-aggrandizing, I just mean that life is a little like the Marshmallow test. We can either eat the one in front of us, or wait a little while and have two marshmallows. I suppose that's my round about way of asking that in 2017 (and hopefully every consecutive year until the day I die) we decide to save money for a better day instead of buying a tub of ice cream and eating our feelings. In 2017, instead of discounting time spent studying now as time wasted for a test we might fail, we study now and reap the benefits of having to do less work in the future.

It's hard to feel it but fear and hyperbolic discounting control everything we do. 2017 is a year I hope isn't about that.

All in all, thank you for staying true to yourself. Thank you for making it this far, thank you for trying to go farther. Dad always says that you can only lead as far as you've gone, and you can only go as far as you work to get to.

It's been a tough year.

But so was 2015. And we made it through both. Maybe 2017 will be awful, and we all know, in trilogies, the third is the worst. But life always regresses to the mean. It might not always be good, but that also means it won't always be bad. And when it's bad, there are always friends to nag to, a blog to give your unsolicited views on the world to, and the knowledge that it won't be that way forever. Life is a series of tough years each varying in levels of toughness. Every year since the doctor delivered you and slapped your butt and gave you screaming to your mamma is a tough year.

Life throws curveballs.

Dust yourself off, get back on your feet and yell real loud, "Is that all you got?"

There's a flame inside you that can never be snuffed. There's a sparkle in your eye that can never be dimmed. There's a song in your heart that never stops playing. There's a wit in your voice that will never start fading. There's a universe in your mind that's always expanding. There's a story you're writing that just hasn't ended. There's that instinct to survive so sharp, it'll never dull. You always talk about the day you'll walk into traffic, but live like it'll never come. There have been better men, but a whole lot of them never made it to where you are. There are plenty of worse men, and they've made it really far. There's that part of you that you can trust to be right when everything else says you're wrong. There's a swagger in your step that never truly goes away, waiting for the right song to come on.

You're a writer, and artist, a genius, a madman, a singer, a guitarist, a pixel artist, a programmer, a loving member of a loving family and a man with a whole lot of good friends you can count on, a survivor, a fighter, a visionary who sees a whole different future, just a man with a couple dreams, a man with wounds to suture, a conquerer, a strategist and a straight up panicker.

But for all that, remember that everything and anything can change in a single moment.

Life throws curveballs.

And I know it sounds a little like I'm saying everyone experiences it, so you don't have to be sad. I know it can be hard, and it's okay to cry until the tears reach your nose and the snot reaches your eyes and it's okay because you will feel insufferable sadness for a little while but it all ends and you'll see the sunny days again. You walk through dark trenches and you you fight as an atheist in a foxhole.

Life throws curve balls.

But you catch a few of them.