Future Me

Made it. (And, oh the stories.)

Thumbs-up in April 2020

If your present self would like to rest your eyes … open your ears here for the audio version.

March 2020. I was about to begin rehearsals for my first big show I was cast in at the Alliance Theater. I also had plenty of work coming my way in on-camera work, voiceover sessions, audiobook narrations … Overall, life felt like one endless field of blooming possibilities, radiating toward me in all the color and light of a gorgeous bouquet.

And then a massive darkness descended and obliterated it all.

You know what I’m referring to. A global pandemic that, if you’re reading these words, means we both have something profound to be grateful for - namely, we are still here.

Most evenings, my better half and I sit on our front porch to watch the sunset. Something we finally had time for during the lockdown days, and it’s become a habit that has carried on over the last six years. During these sweet, unhurried stretches we talk about everything and nothing - the full, rambling range of nonsense and intimacy that nearly three decades together can produce.

Recently, while we were reflecting on the pandemic, he leaned over and said: “I only wish that ‘future me’ could have told ‘present me’ - back when I was completely freaking out -that everything was going to be okay. That so much good would come out of so much awful.”

And isn’t that true for so many things, not just once-in-a-lifetime catastrophic events? If our future selves could show up more often in our present moments to tell us we’re going to make it - maybe bruised and broken but stronger for it - maybe we’d breathe a little easier. We’d know that on the other side of whatever is currently consuming our days and nights, there will be stories worth telling. Porches worth sitting on talking with loved ones. Tables worth gathering around and sharing meals together.

As I grow older and notice that the years ahead are fewer than the years behind, I wonder about her: my future me. Did she finally ditch everything, the way she and her favorite human dreamed about on that porch, and go off to have grand adventures? Or did she play it safer, staying with the work she knows and loves - the work that brings comfort and a paycheck and good wine on a Tuesday? Did she forgive herself for not having the answers the moment the questions arrived, and yet kept asking them anyway?

I think she did. All of it, somehow.

The only way I know how to meet a happy, blooming future self is to keep tending to the soil of this present self that I’m living in and with. And here’s what I’ve learned that my soil needs: curiosity. Expectation of good things. A stubborn belief that the world is, at its core, kind and generous, even when the headlines make that feel laughable.

It’s far too easy to doom-scroll. To doom-live. But what if, instead, we made one small decision today that our future self will thank us for? Not a grand gesture. Just a choice to turn toward the light - a choice to tend our own soil, to stay open, to keep asking the questions even without the answers.

My future self is out there. She made it. And I know she has stories.

I’m doing my best, every day, to give her something good to work with.

‘til next time. Love y’all.