A compassionate letter for future self

Hello Esther,

Even though you were jobless under US visa stress and hold a broken heart, you could still find lots of peace and happiness. I wrote this to you because I wanted to tell you there would be lots of hard times in your life like this, but I trust you to navigate yourself and found joy in the process.

You inherit the joy of learning.

Let me tell you about my day today. Today is the first week of your hacker house. You still don’t know how to get 2 jobs in 2 months while building 2 technical projects, but you know you are on the way. The day wasn’t smooth, you felt quite anxious starting a project with your flatmate because you had no experience and no confidence. If you can still recall, today, you were trying to build an auto-email follow-up system, because you found following up is a painful process that you need to remember to do on time, but also doesn’t seem to be pushy. The invisible mental stress inside you often yields procrastination, especially in your job search.

Before the start, you were really really nervous. You were afraid that your housemate would find you dumb and didn’t want to help, or took away things you wanted to learn. But this wasn’t true, you weren't dumb, and your housemate was very collaborative to help set up the system and taught you GitHub collaboration too. In fact, you actually made lots of crucial progress. You started to fetch emails using some API you haven’t tried before. You figured out how to get labels of the emails, and how to find the latest emails from the entire thread that haven’t been replied to. You figured out all the email-fetching part yourself with a sprinkle of help from your housemate. You weren’t desperate in debugging as you thought. Even though you were anxious, you felt proud that you just built your 0 to 1 muscles a little bit more today.

You are on the way.

Even though you didn’t know how to distribute your time building and finding jobs, you had great people around you. They told you clicking applications and feeling secure was just an illusion. You were born to learn, build, and network with people to learn even more. That’s your natural habitat. You felt grateful that when you wanted to shy away from your long-term goal and looked for short-term comfort, you had people around you to direct your focus and reminded you who you were. You did the same for them too. You and Phuong directed Eugene to actually experiment with finding niche audiences on Twitter rather than finding a random software engineering job with the goal to build a school as his dream. Eugene helped Phuong to expand her job search from edtech to learning development. You felt proud and empowered when navigating others, while grounded and remembering who you are when being navigated.

Fear of the future doesn’t come from not knowing where are you, but not knowing where you are going. It’s okay not knowing where to go sometimes, but you are born with a compass at your heart all the time.

You feel present and healthy.

After the intense programming, you went on a jog in Golden Gate Part. You felt healthy and appreciated the love you gave yourself and the love the world gave you. You gave yourself time to rest and to be healthy. The world gave you the greeny forest and the sniffy dogs. You observed how to be present from your second ex, but now, it’s a part of you already.

Though there were still many moments, almost every day, you had tears whirling in your eyes, you saw the good part of your past. When you were having dinner, you recalled your ex told you when she drink tea, it was only about the tea. The bitter-sweet taste of the tea on the tip of the tongue and the warmth of the steam of the tea touched the nose. You saw that images of your ex saying that many many times already. And each time when you saw it, you put down your phone and tried being present too. Today, you were amazed by merely the scent of an egg yolk you cooked on the overly salty teriyaki chicken. You learned that no matter how many bad things happened to you in your story, the world still had a lot to offer you if you pay attention to it.

Future Esther, I wonder if you look back, will you find this period one of the happiest and most satisfying times in your life? Sounds contradictory, but maybe? You tell me. Forget to tell you, I’m not writing this to teach you. I have no doubt that the future Esther will be much more capable than I am now. I just want to remind you to find good things that might happen around you when life is extra hard. As you already know, I always love you as I have proudly announced in front of the entire class in high school. I have immense trust in you no matter what happens. Now I’m writing in tears because of the huge amount of love that I feel for you already. I’m just slightly afraid that you feel less love because I write in English. But given your ability to love and feel loved, I guess when you read it in the future, you will still be able to receive as much love, if not even more, as I’m writing to you now.

If you are in pain when you read it, I would give you a hug and cry with you. If you feel happy, I will smile with you in bed tonight too.

Warm hug,

Past Esther from San Francisco, June 9th, 2023

This is the 19th post from my 30-day writing challenges. I was inspired by Tung Nguyen, a friend who is a famous blogger. He overcame the fear of creation through mass-producing blogs and eventually found his own niche audiences.