Letters To Yesterday

Welcome back to Letters to Yesterday, a podcast of messages to the past. Thank you to everyone who listened to the first few episodes, and a special thank you to everyone who left a review on iTunes or shared our episodes. That helps more people find us! You guys are great. Also your hair looks nice today. Today’s letter comes from Justin from Portland, who wanted to only be identified as Justin from Portland, and wanted to remind us that the protests there are still going on there. Also, this letter has language that may not be appropriate for children.     Dear Fucking Dirtbag It’s me. I’m you, but a little less of a dirtbag. You’re like 17 maybe, and a few months from getting kicked out of the house. That’s fine. It was a shitty house. It was a shitty childhood. You’re going to kind of make up with mom later, but I’m not here to talk about that. I’m here to talk about cooking Because guess what, you have to feed yourself now. That fucking sucks, from a lot of different ways. It costs money, which sucks, and it takes work, which sucks, and it’s hard, which sucks. You still have to eat though. Here’s how to make it suck less. Step one, you don’t hate vegetables, turns out. You hate the way your family cooked them. You don’t need to fucking boil everything. Making something hot isn’t cooking. Well, it is cooking. It’s bad cooking. You’re going to do bad cooking for a long time too, so maybe ignore me on that. Wait I’m going too fast. Let’s try again. You gotta buy some shit. You have zero money so let’s get like three things. You need a knife. You’re going to the dollar store, so just get one that’s not serrated. Get a saucepan. It’s the deep one, idiot. Not the flat one. You need a flat one too, but let’s just get the deep one right now. A cutting board. Okay we can work with this. Next you’re going to buy pasta. Shut up. Pasta. I know you don’t like pasta, but you know what’s cheap? Fucking pasta. Now buy a jar of sauce. Quick tip – I got the kind with a little old white lady on the front and that was the trick. Get the one that looks like they have zero money to make a good label. That’s the good one. The box has instructions on it. Make the pasta. You need less than you think. Drain it. That’s hard because you don’t have a strainer but just do your best. Oh also, the apartment where you’re crashing has one working stove top, which you’ll figure out pretty quick. One day you’ll have like three working stove tops and you’re going to lose your shit like you won the lottery. Next, pour the sauce on the past and heat it up. Congrats you made food. You can put cheese on that if you want. Yeah, it’s just that fucking easy. You can feed yourself like this for awhile too, so you have time to learn other stuff. I’m not going to do every recipe but you have internet on your phone and the internet knows how to cook things, even if you’re poor. Which we are. Yeah we’re still poor. Shit sucks. Here’s some other shit it’ll save you time if you learn. Use garlic and onions. I know you think you don’t like them, but you have to learn to like them. They make food better food. They just fucking do. Don’t worry about the right way to cut or store or whatever. A lot of cooking shows make a big deal about it and it’ll make you feel bad, but just do it whatever way and do it better later. Okay you know that pot you got? You can cook vegetables in that. Use salt and pepper and, yeah, that garlic. Don’t boil it. It only takes a few minutes and it’s better. You can do them in the oven too, but that needs a whole nother pot, so skip it. Try new shit too. This one’s hard, because you don’t have a lot of money to spend on going out and you just want what you like, but you are going to have chances to try new things so do that. Do that every time. And ask questions. People like talking about stuff they make. It doesn’t make you look stupid. It took me a long time to learn that one, so you’re welcome for giving it to you right now. Also it turns out literally every vegetable has a different way to tell it’s ripe. That seems like a stupid way to design things, but whatever. Here’s a trick. Find someone else by the vegetables and ask them. Yeah it sucks, but you’re never going to see that person again in your life and now you don’t have shitty tomatoes. You’re welcome. Also wash your shit. Do your dishes. Don’t skip food for days because the dishes are dirty. It takes like twenty minutes for fuck’s sake. Don’t let them sit there and stink. Okay, I’m still bad about this too. I did say I was only slightly less of a dirtbag. I’m working on it. I guess we’re working on it. Also just, hang in there. The next few years are going to be rough. One of the nice things about living now (also rough) is we got through the shitty ones. You just keep going forward. You just keep learning new things. You got this. I love you.   Love, Dirtbag   P.S. Thank you to Les Hayden for the use of their song Ophelia. Thank you to everyone who has submitted wonderful letters. Justin’s letter really made me think about what I want this podcast to look like. It’s wonderful to read everyone’s huge, life-changing advice, but I’d love to see more about small things – cooking, rock climbing, learning a new thing, finding a favorite book, adopting an animal, getting lost – all these little things that are important to us none the less.   If you’d like to write a letter, we’d love to read it. You can submit letters to Letters To Yes, that’s Y E S at gmail. The letter should be between 1000 and 2000 words and can be on any topic. What did you need to hear a year ago? Ten years ago? You can also join on us facebook and twitter at letterstoyes. Letters to Yesterday is Produced by Leslie J. Anderson.   Stay safe out there.

Welcome back to Letters to Yesterday, a podcast of messages to the past. Here we read letters from our listeners to their past selves, sharing advice and guidance. Hopefully we’ll inspire each other. Thank you again to everyone who left us a review and everyone who’s listened so far. Today’s letter comes from Catherine Lundoff. Catherine is an award-winning writer, editor and publisher from Minneapolis, Minnesota. Her books include Silver Moon, Out of This World: Queer Speculative Fiction Stories and Unfinished Business: Tales of the Dark Fantastic. She is the editor of Scourge of the Seas of Time (and Space), as well as several other anthologies, and a wide array of fiction in multiple genres. In addition, she is also the publisher at Queen of Swords Press, a small press specializing in fiction from out of this world. www.catherinelundoff.net     Dear Me That Was: I am looking at a picture of you on your senior field trip, the one where you went with your class to take yearbook pictures outside Lincoln Center. You’re trying to look tough and bored, but really you look tired and tense. You’re leaning on the guy that you’re seeing in secret because high school is complicated and yours is a bit more complicated than a lot of others, for its time. It’s a group picture and most of your classmates aren’t looking at the camera. Some are watching each other or something beyond the photographer that I can’t remember now or just plain staring off into space. Most look the way you do, tired, bored and unhappy. I remember why you felt that way. You’re a scholarship student at a high school where you are genteelly poor but most of your classmates have families much better off than yours, you’re under lots of pressure to keep your grades up, you’ve got an alcoholic parent waiting for you at home, you’ve got a secret not-quite boyfriend with his own baggage and you’ve got an all weekend/every weekend job as a cashier at a local supermarket. And, of course, you’re the yearbook editor and you’re trying to maintain your status as 3rd or 4th (depending on the day) in line for being valedictorian because that’s what you were told colleges would look for. It is a lot. And I’d tell that it won’t always be like this, but that would be a lie and as a rule, I don’t lie to anyone, and certainly not to you. What it will be is training and conditioning for the years to come. You will find things that you love and that you love doing and you will learn to juggle what needs to be done with what you really want to do. You will learn to compartmentalize, to tune out and focus. A lot of this will be amazingly useful. Some of it, on the other hand, will be bad for you and you’ll spend years figuring out the difference. But you’ll do it. And that’s when the adventures will begin, all of them, including things you never imagined would happen. Not the you in this picture, anyway. Wait, that’s not true. The adventures start long before then, it’s just that you won’t always recognize them as such. You’re going to go off to college in a different state and create a whole new you, one that goes from hippy to New Wave in two semesters. You’ll find your people, start playing D&D and discover science fiction and fantasy. You’re going to do everything from joining the Society for Creative Anachronism to doing performance art in St. Louis. Why? Because it’s the 1980s and it’s part of you trying out things that your friends like to do to see if you like them too. Did I mention that you’ll have friends? Lots of friends, although it will take a while to be able to pick out the ones worth keeping. And lovers. You feel like no one is ever going to really love you now, but it’s not true. It isn’t even true for you right now, me in this picture, but sometimes, it’s hard to recognize that. Oh, and by the way, some of that unresolved emotional turmoil? You’re bisexual or queer or whatever you want to call it, but definitely not straight. Figuring that out is going to be messy and huge, but you’ll be a lot happier once you realize it’s a good thing. And all the baggage that you carried through high school, all the coping skills and dependencies you developed to keep yourself going, all the while ignoring a lot of what you wanted and what you needed, will fall apart and you’ll need to rebuild them, modify them, change them so they work for you. That last year, that photo, that field trip? That’s part of you figuring some of it out. That’s you with your friends and the clothes you bought with your own job, your own money. That’s also you standing around with a bunch of other bored teens posing for a picture in front of one of the great cultural landmarks of New York City. You’re kind of a mess now, but you’ve got the building blocks for a future you’re going to want. So the number one thing I want to tell you is: hang in there. It’s a total cliché, but that doesn’t make it wrong. Roll your eyes all you like. You’ll be doing that a lot anyway. Eventually, you’re going to find more people who get your sense of humor so you might as well start now.  You’re not crazy, not really. And the second thing is that you need to read. Read a bunch. The day will come when you’re going to sit down at a computer (yes, you. They get easier to use than the one that codes in binary that they’re trying to get you to learn right now.) and you’re going to write stories. You’re going to draw on all the things you’ve imagined and some of the things you’ve done and you’re going to make stories that people like to read. Some of them will even find those stories pretty life changing, but that will come later. Learn to get lost in your imagination now, the way you always have when home and school got to be too much to handle, when you needed a shield or an escape. Do that until it gets easier. Finally, believe people when you don’t have a good reason to doubt them. Believe them when they tell you that you’re worth loving, that you write good stories, that you do some good in the world and that you should stick around. It’s hard to realize now, but those people care and they want your way forward to get easier. Try to let people in when you can. Follow the path through the woods, the one that goes through the wardrobe or under hill. Ride the eagle, fight the battles, learn the true names of things, ride with Eowyn.  Above all, try to be honorable and brave when you can. Open the door and step forward…   P.S. Thank you to Les Hayden for the use of their song Ophelia. Thank you to everyone who has submitted wonderful letters. If you’d like to write a letter, we’d love to read it. You can submit letters to Letters To Yes, that’s Y E S at gmail. The letter should be between 1000 and 2000 words and can be on any topic. What did you need to hear a year ago? Ten years ago? You can also join on us facebook and twitter at letterstoyes. Letters to Yesterday is Produced by Leslie J. Anderson. Stay safe out there.  

Heather writes to a time before she began to grapple with her childhood trauma, laying out a path to facing it. Welcome back to Letters to Yesterday, a podcast of messages to the past. Here we read letters to our past selves, and give ourselves advice that someone else might need today. Today’s episode comes with some pretty serious content warnings for childhood trauma and assault. I’d like to thank Heather, our writer, for her honesty and bravery in sharing her story. It can’t have been easy and I feel very honored to read it. Heather is a Mental Health Therapist who works with children in foster care.  She lives in Florida, with her Fiancé and their fur children, while maintaining a long distance relationship with her lady-love.   Dear you, You’re probably laying on the bed, in the room, your boyfriend said you could call yours.  The room next to his kids’ room and across the hall from where he and his wife sleep.  What even is your life?  Don’t worry, nothing gets boring, we still ask that of ourselves today.  Speaking of, today is just less than 2 years in, what you would consider, the future.  I am writing you this letter as a warning, for a lack of a better word.  In the coming weeks you are going to have frequent panic attacks…which of course, you will play off as nothing because, as you will learn in therapy, you believe mental illness is real and valid for everyone except yourself.  When you hear your boyfriend’s kids’ screams of joy, their gut-wrenching sobs, and even when they’re quiet, alone in a room with their own father… all of these things send you into a deep, painful, spiraling panic, and you won’t yet know why.  Don’t worry, your boyfriend isn’t the monster, but you will start having nightmares about someone who is.  Nightmares, you’ve always had, but will start to mean so much more. I know that you’ve wondered, what the fuck is wrong with you…I believe at this point you’ve even thought, nothing that terrible has ever even happened to you, so stop being so scared.  I am so sorry, Heather.  This just isn’t the truth.  In about a month’s time, you are going to remember… things.  Not precise minute by minute memories, but flashes.  Flashes of things so terrible they literally make you vomit.  These flashes will make you scream and sometimes you even catch yourself holding your fists closed so tightly, that your anxiety bitten fingernails are drawing blood in the palms of your hands. You are going to feel, completely, out of control.  You are going to tell yourself you are making it up.  You are going to look at yourself in disgust as you wonder why your brain would even put these images together.  You are going to call your sisters.  They are going to confirm everything.  Which isn’t better.  In fact it makes you hate yourself, for being unable to protect them.  Try to remain calm when one of your baby sisters gets angry with you for not having to remember this thing for the last 25, or so, years.  Keep your boundaries but be supportive when both of your sisters insist that “he’s changed.”  And try, I mean really try, your hardest to control your rage when you realize they have had this knowledge all along, yet still allowed your nieces to be in his presence, alone. Remember to have empathy, they have felt broken and alone, for much, longer than you, which, when you realize that will make so much sense. The more pieces of this puzzle come together, the more broken you will feel…to a point.  Eventually your brokenness will merely be an ingredient in the potion, your brewing, called strength.  That power, known as resilience, that you have always been able to tap into will make itself known, again.  You will get through this.  You will thrive.  But before you do, there are a few tips that I would like to relay.  1) Be vulnerable.  I know, I know, we ab-so-lutely fucking hate this.  But, please believe me, you will learn that being vulnerable is true strength, and not the weakness you have convinced yourself it is.  The quicker you embrace the ability to be vulnerable, the quicker you will start to heal.  Hiding all of this inside your head helps no one and dramatically hurts you.  2) Build your support system.  I know this sucks too.  You’re a strong independent woman who doesn’t need anyone.  As much as this hurts to hear, you will learn that this is not true.  You are strong and you are independent but these are not necessarily the be all end all to your magic.  Set boundaries.  There is, believe it or not, a middle ground between the militant independence you practice now and the paralyzing pit of codependence you’ve fallen into, in your past.  3) Trust your damn self.  This one is hard.  Your whole life has consisted of abuse and people showing you, that you have no value.  People making decisions for you or making you second guess yourself.  People teaching you that muting yourself is safer than speaking out loud.  You’ve always wanted to take responsibility for yourself and this is the time.  You are no longer being abused.  Do not let the people that you have worked so hard to remove from your life continue to have such a hold on you.  Your life is yours, babe. Sometimes it just helps to hear that.  I imagine that you are reading this, becoming more and more pissed at me for not just coming out and saying the thing.  This terrible thing that you will remember so very soon.  We always yell at the people in movies who do this; communicate from the future and leave out, what seems to be, the most important part. I am hoping, that this letter conveys the message, that the overhanging cloud, the thing you will remember, is actually not the most important thing.  I’m hoping you will use this letter to figure out what is the most important thing, and move along from there. The last bit of wisdom that I’ll leave to you is that healing from trauma is a whole damn process for a reason.  You are healing your mind, your soul, your neural pathways.  This is A LOT.  Take it in small steps and on bad days make those steps even smaller, and on worse days just promise me you’ll be kind to yourself.  These things that you will learn, over the next 2 years, will be life altering.  Every bit of you will be smashed to the ground in a million pieces, but those three things; being vulnerable, having support, and trusting your damn self, will help you conjure yourself into me.  As much as I love you, I love me more and I’m really rooting for you, because one day you’ll be me…and man, you’ll just get it. Catch you on the flip side. Love, Me P.S.   Thank you to Les Hayden for the use of their song Ophelia. Thank you to everyone who has submitted letters. I’ve been incredibly touched by what you’ve shared with me. You’re all awesome. Thank you also to everyone who has shared our podcast and left us reviews! I really appreciate it. If you’d like to write a letter, we’d love to read it. You can submit letters to Letters To Yes, that’s Y E S at gmail. The letter should be between 1000 and 2000 words and can be on any topic. What did you need to hear a year ago? Ten years ago? You can also join on us facebook and twitter at letterstoyes. Letters to Yesterday is Produced by Leslie J. Anderson. Stay safe out there.

Steven talks to his high school self, giving himself permission to set boundaries and knock others down. Welcome back to Letters to Yesterday, a podcast of messages to the past. Thank you to everyone who listened to the first few episodes, and a special thank you to everyone who left a review on iTunes or sent me a lovely note. It’s hard to start a new project and I very much appreciate the encouragement. Today’s letter comes from Steven, a 32 year old gay man, system administrator, and card game nerd, living in Jackson Florida.   Dear Steven, You're sitting on your seat in the high school auditorium, wearing that silly outfit, feeling the weight of your class ring. You know one thing, and only one thing, after four years: "Everything I know is coming to an end, soon. I don't know what to do." And it's that moment, that panic, that is going to make it so easy to seize on the first direction someone even vaguely suggests.  The most important piece of advice I can give you is this: Don't forget that you are a person, too. You have goals, and ideas, and dreams. You know what you want, even if you don't know how to get it yet. You're good at internet things. Trust me, if you give yourself enough time, you'll figure it out, I promise. So... take suggestions under advisement, don't take them as gospel. The only regrets you'll have in the future are the ones that come from choices where you let someone else dictate what you'll do with your life. You're allowed to say "no." You're allowed to say "no" to your mom. To your friends. To the people you think of as family, even though in a decade you might not think that any more. The power of the word no is something you should treasure. Use it as often as you like. You don't have to whisper it to yourself when you're alone in your room at three AM and no one can hear you say it. You don't have to hold it in while you smile and nod and agree with people who's only interest is their own. It's not a forbidden spell that will unlock the gates of hell and wreak havoc on the mortal world. But it is a charm. It's a personal one, that will let you learn how to set boundaries. You can weave those two magical letters together and stop someone from hurting you... at least for a while. You can freeze time with that word! Or at least, it can give you time you need to make a decision. And when you know in your heart of hearts that what you're about to do is going to be wrong for you, it can save you. It's versatile like that.  You're even allowed to say "no" to yourself. When you're stuck, and you've got that panic in your chest. When you are getting in your own way, because you think that you have to help everyone else long before you consider helping yourself. That's when you say "No" to yourself.  Now, here's the kicker: You can say "Yes" too. Even when the idea of saying yes is terrifying. Most of the things you want to say "yes" to aren't going to hurt you. Not really. Or at least they won't always. Sometimes saying yes opens you up to things like heartbreak. It's tangy and bitter and trust me, no one is a fan. But if you don't say yes sometimes, you'll lose chances to get what you want. Life will just pass you by, and you'll find yourself wondering where it went. Speaking of terrifying... You have to stop being scared of the doctor. Of what it means when he tells you that you need to start taking medicine, because what's happening to you isn't normal. I know you think 'drugs will change who I am as a person!' And you'll be right, sort of. You'll be able to finish your thoughts on those days when they just won't slow down, and every idea is the best idea, and you can't stop doing everything that comes to you, regardless of whether or not it's actually a good idea, or if you've even finished the other things. You'll be able to go a whole week without those thoughts and feelings that make you want to stop, just stop because nothing will ever be okay. You might go a month!  You're scared that if you say "yes" to this, that it means you're crazy. That something's wrong with you. You're scared that if you say yes to this diagnosis, and this plan, that you'll lose what makes you special. You'll lose your spark, and your creativity, and you will no longer be you. Those fears are normal. All of them. But you know as well as I do, you can't do nothing now that you know this. You either have to accept it, or deny it, and what I can tell you from experience is that denying it doesn't make it go away.  You aren't broken because you're bipolar. And you won't stop being you because you're getting it treated. Treatment isn't perfect, and it isn't easy, but it helps. I promise it helps. Okay. Take a deep breath. One more. Okay, now actually do it, because I know you're just holding your breath to be stubborn.  Before I forget: Take better care of yourself physically, too. It's important. It will suck, and you'll hate it, but part of remembering that you're a person is remembering that you have a body you have to live in. It's the only one you get. Trust me, physical health also helps your mental health. It isn't the cure, but it doesn't hurt, either. Back to the subject at hand: The auditorium. Not knowing what to do next. I can't tell you what you should do, but I can tell you what you shouldn't do. You shouldn't just agree with your mom that college right now is what you need. You've been in school for over a decade now. Take a break. Take a breather. Give yourself more than a week to decide on a college, and more than two weeks before you start. (Spoiler alert, that college? Not a great idea even if you do decide to go to school immediately.)  Practice that "no" I talked about earlier. It feels bad, at first, especially because this is Mom we're talking about. You haven't said no to her for a long time. But I'll let you in on a secret: She's not perfect. She wants what's best for you, but like you, she doesn't really know what that is, either. So take that opportunity for yourself, and consider what you really want to get out of life. It's okay to wait a while. You've got a job, a car, and time.  I'm going to say this again because it bears repeating: You are your own person, and you're allowed to say no to protect yourself. Just don't use no as a crutch to hide from the world.  The power of no will change your whole life for the better.  Now go forth and practice your "no" in the mirror.    P.S. Thank you to Les Hayden for the use of their song Ophelia. Thank you to everyone who has submitted wonderful letters. If you’d like to write a letter, we’d love to read it. You can submit letters to Letters To Yes, that’s Y E S at gmail. The letter should be between 1000 and 2000 words and can be on any topic. What did you need to hear a year ago? Ten years ago? You can also join on us facebook and twitter at letterstoyes. Letters to Yesterday is Produced by Leslie J. Anderson. Stay safe out there.

In this episode, the writer talks to his high school self about leaving behind the things he loves...or not. Hi, twelve-years-ago-me! If I’ve timed this correctly, yesterday you got a letter that you had written to yourself in high school, and today you’re getting a letter from the future! Your Statistics teacher, Mr. Carcelli, had asked everyone in the class to write a letter to their future selves, a letter that he promised you’d get five years later. He was always the cool teacher, the one who brought fun games like Pass the Pig into class that didn’t make you feel like you were learning Statistics (even though you were), who’d play your favorite band, Barenaked Ladies, while you focused on in-class work, the teacher you’d made a special trip to go back to visit when you were in town. I probably don’t need to reiterate the contents of that letter since you just read it, but I’m a sucker for nostalgia. 2003-Saker asked 2008-Saker if he was still with his early-aughts girlfriend (broken up, of course; who the hell stays with their high school girlfriend?), he joked about the game sequels he thought he’d be likely to see (they are still making Sonic games, weirdly), and he enclosed a single dollar as a funny gag, even though he speculated that it would be pretty much worthless five years from then. As a tribute to that, I’ve enclosed a hundred dollars in this letter. In 2020, the economy (and the American government as a whole) has fallen, and money means nothing. We routinely use sawbucks to wipe our butts, so I figure this’ll be better spent by you back in 2008. Nah, I’m fucking with you. I just have a job now and can afford to spend money on dumb jokes. But wouldn’t that be wild? Yesterday, when you got that letter from 2003, you were entering your final year of college. Graduating high school, you knew you had to go to college--it was expected, of course, and you had been offered a full ride to the same university that the rest of your family went to when they were your age, so it was a given that you were going to attend. But you were terrified; you’d never been away from home and all of its comforts for any significant amount of time. Your community had seemed so important at the time (Yes, the friends that you don’t talk to anymore, the Denny’s that got torn down a couple of years ago, all of those things.) To be clear: this isn’t a message about how important it is to grow up. I know it seems that way, like there’s some bigger metaphor about how your old town represents all the immature stuff you used to do and how you have to grow out of those things to become a wiser, older, sagely silver fox. First: you only have a few greys, okay? Mid-thirties are the new mid-twenties. Second: I know the Denny’s seems like a metaphor. The Denny’s is not a metaphor. Let the Denny’s go. Telling somebody to grow up would be a tremendously douchey reason to send a letter through time anyway, right? Let kids be kids! (Yes, you’re still a kid, even if you don’t think you are. You’re 22. Last year you asked your roommates if your girlfriend could live in your shared apartment rent-free because she was going to be staying in your room and you “already pay rent for that area.” You’re a goddamn baby.) When you got to college, four whole hours away from your cool basement bungalow with your two TVs, one for video games and one for watching Adult Swim while you played video games, the very first thing you did was go to the student involvement fair, and stand on the circle in the student square, in the middle of all the booths. You were surrounded by a mass of other students, kids your age, going to clubs and signing up for things with an air of confidence that made you truly question why you didn’t have it all together yet. There were fraternities with the kids who looked like the ones who’d made fun of you in the hallways, the women’s health and wellness club, completely inapplicable to you, the aerial yoga club that seemed like it was full of people who might as well be aliens--but you stood there, in that walkway near those booths in the middle of all of those kids, and you listened, and you caught a familiar melody: Tonari no Totoro, the eponymous theme song for the Ghibli film known in the US as My Neighbor Totoro. Like a child under the spell of the Pied Piper, you followed it through the swarms of 18-year-olds, people who were laughing and chatting with each other and making friends, a task that seemed absolutely impossible now that high school was over, and arrived at the booth the anime club, a place that would become your safe haven for the next five years. It would be the place where you found a friend who would become the best man at your wedding, the place that would eventually lead you to the city where you’d spend your adult life, the place that would nurture the things you considered dumb creative pursuits, things that would blossom into lifelong hobbies. This isn’t a story about how you had to leave behind all of those childish things. This is a story about how you kept all of the things you enjoyed when you were young, and took them with you, and made them a critical part of who you are and who you’ll remain. How the things that made you happy, the things that everybody said you’ll grow out of, how they continue to make you happy today.  It’s bizarre to think about, but I’ve been out of high school and away from my hometown now for half of my life. I don’t want to spoil anything for you, but for the most part (there are some pretty big and difficult asterisks along the way, to be sure), life continues to get better, and it always winds its way back around to the things you love. You meet your future wife due to a mutual acquaintance at an anime convention. You get paid to stand in front of people on a stage and yell into a microphone about your favorite Dungeons and Dragons class. You name your first son after a character from a TV show you love and and it’s the perfect name and you can’t imagine your little dude being named absolutely anything else. And all the things you carried with you, all these things you’re passionate about, you’ll give them to your son. And some he’ll bring with him when he gets older, surely, and maybe he’ll pass them onto his kid, who’ll maybe keep the cycle going. But for the most part, he’ll be a different person from you. And one day, it’s possible that he’ll consider the place you live that you love so much as “his dumpy hometown,” and he’ll move onto better and brighter places. Or maybe he won’t! I’m still waiting on the letter from my future version that’s going to clue me into all that. But if there’s a lesson from all of this, maybe this is it: love what you love and carry it forward and share it with everyone, but let them love what they love, too. That’s okay! Anyway, seeing as I don’t remember receiving this letter in 2008, I’ll probably just end up creating an inescapable time paradox upon sending it. Or...maybe I just wont send it at all, in fact? I’ve watched enough time travel movies to realize I could be erasing myself. And anyway, the lessons you need to learn and the growing up you’ll do are always going to happen. And you’re strong enough and smart enough to get through them, carrying what you love. Hug your dad and tell him you love him, Saker    

Our letter writer writes to himself in childhood, to warn him about depression, but mostly about the shame that comes with it.   Dear Young Jarod, I picture you reading this high in your favorite maple tree, the one that makes you feel secret and special. The one where thirty feet above the ground you lay astride a great forking limb like a big cat in the dappled sunlight. The one that, forty yards off, looks into your childhood bedroom. Let’s say you’re thirteen and that from a distance it would seem that your thoughts would be as light as the pale green leaves fluttering around you. But, of course, we both know that’s not true. You are carrying two very heavy stones. One of those stones will take a great deal of work to chip away over time. The other, with some courage and persistence, you can set down right now. You are struggling with both chronic depression and the shame you feel about your illness. I don’t need to tell you that depression is brutal. Depression piles pain upon pain on your shoulders, mental and physical. You know this and that’s not what this letter is about. This letter is about shame. The shame is, in some respects, more insidious because it tells you that your depression is the natural result of being an inherently broken person. The shame tells you that the depression is a natural symptom of being a weak and flawed creature. In this way, the pain of depression becomes the punishment you’re owed, not the enemy you resist. We’ll get back to shame in a moment. Let’s talk about our mental health in general. Mental health is work and if there is a way to master it permanently and decisively, I haven’t found it yet. I expect that’s hard to hear at your age. I get it, but it’s not all bad news. What I have found is skillsets and support structures that strip away that feeling of powerlessness that accompanies depression. If depression is akin to weather, then I’ve found a reliable source of umbrellas and a good supply of sturdy outerwear. It’s progress, but the real progress came after I found ways of addressing the shame and secrecy surrounding my illness. Part of my shame has always sprung from a mix of pride and fear. Pride in my talents. Fear that those talents are fake, inconsequential, or utterly outweighed by my shortcomings. In school, I was called gifted. In writing and poetry, I was even called a prodigy. What do you notice about these labels? Gifted? Prodigy? Well, they had nothing to do with effort or skill and everything to do with innate qualities. So, that suggested that my achievements were not about choice or effort or exercising my agency. No, they were a natural function of who or what I am. So, if that’s the case for my successes, what does that mean for my shortcomings? It means they aren’t the natural mistakes made by every human being. It means that my failures are woven into my identity as surely as my talents.  Either I am success, or I am failure. Shame can grow from many seeds, these are just a few of mine. Still, you haven’t noticed these things yet and I hope that noticing helps. I hope you recognize the source of that fear when you shy away from trying something difficult or taxing. That fear is the fear of being imperfect, the fear of being human and, like depression itself, it’s isolating and withering. What is it about depression that makes it such rich soil for cultivating shame? I think it has to do with the nature of mental illness, specifically the mental part. When we suffer from an ingrown toenail or a toothache, we rarely jump to the conclusion that the illness is evidence of a flawed character. That’s because these aren’t maladies of the mind. We like to imagine our bodies are just the machines that carry around the ‘real’ essence of who we are, they are the houses we haunt. Bodies get sick. They age. They fail. That’s intrinsic to their character and that reality is bound up in what we understand to be the human experience. The mind, on the other hand, is supposed to be the ‘real’ us, the part of us that is not so crude or mundane as meat and blood and bone. So, if the mind is sick, that’s an indictment of our “who,” not merely our “what.” It means our identity is sick, not just our substance. This makes a kind of sense, except that it’s completely ridiculous. Your brain is a special, fascinating miracle of the natural world, but it’s also an organ of the body. It’s flesh and water and electricity and the fact that it’s the seat of your thoughts does not make it immune to malady. Depression is, without any doubt, an illness and should be thought of as such. If a virus hijacks the machinery of your cells to manufacture more viruses, you wouldn’t take ownership of the decision to produce viruses, would you? If you have an allergic reaction to poison ivy, you wouldn’t measure your self-worth by the itching of your skin, would you? No. So how is it that self-worth and the value of your personhood becomes tied to the painful negative thoughts that you neither willfully created nor invited into your skull. Depression is not a mirror of your identity nor a yardstick with which to evaluate the quality of your personhood. It’s the flu. It’s a poison ivy rash.  It’s the emotional equivalent of a persistent headache. Of course, poison ivy doesn’t usually make its victims wish for death and depression often does. That’s part of the problem. I’m sure, young Jarod, that my metaphors make a kind of logical sense to you, but we both know that depression doesn’t always obey logic. Well, In fact, it does obey logic, but it obeys logic in the way stone obeys water. The process isn’t a sandcastle being swept away by the tide. It’s more like the slow erosion that carved the Grand Canyon. It takes a steady, willful application of this kind of logic to make a dent in shame and depression, and the whole time the depression will be insisting that resistance is both exhausting and ultimately pointless. It will insist that it isn’t really depression because you have legitimate reasons to be miserable. It will insist that bone deep sorrow is what you deserve. Despite all the illusions that depression can conjure, your brain is still your best ally in this fight. Yes, it’s the seat of the disease, but you need to trust me on this most vital point: depression does not own all the real estate of your brain. It wants you to think it does. Through the mechanism of shame, depression will tell you that the entirety of your mind has been coopted and rewired to produce only doubt and hopelessness and pain, but that just isn’t true. Your brain is more complex, resilient, and expansive than that. Depression is an occupying force in the castle of your mind, but you have a wide variety of secret passages, hidden rooms, and sliding bookcases from which to wage a guerrilla war to take back your skull. The main progress I have achieved at this stage in my life has been thanks to medication and Cognitive Behavioral Therapy. Except it’s not quite that simple. It wasn’t one medication. It wasn’t one therapist. It was trial and error and then more trial and error. You have to approach the situation as a scientific question. Hypothesis. Experiment. Data. Conclusion. Repeat. The thing is, you can only do this kind of work once you step out from the shadow of shame and that paralyzing fear of failure. The good news is you don’t have to do it perfectly. You hear me, you stubborn arboreal weirdo? If you have to go at it with an all or nothing attitude, then try this -resolve to do an imperfect job on your quest to escape shame and build coping skills. There, now you can be perfect in your pursuit of imperfection. If you think that’s nonsense, let me tell you some things I learned later in life. Down the line, you get pretty interested in weightlifting. In the pursuit of that very physical hobby, you discover some very nonphysical quirks. For example, when lifting heavy weights, it’s easier to count to three four times than count to twelve once. Why? Because the higher numbers seemed to que my body to prepare to failure, whereas the simple trick of counting to a lower number multiple times short-circuited this issue. Simple? Yes. Silly? Sure. But if you haven’t figured it out by now, words are actual magic. Language is actual magic. I think you have always known that, but you have yet to ask for its help with your own inner life and struggles. Please do so. You can use language against shame. You can use words against depression. Language can be both your art and your ally. Doesn’t that feel right? I known that change is scary. I know that trying is scary, not least of all because the hope of recovery is such a bright and fragile thing that it hurts to look at and seems too precious to touch. Well, remember years ago when you were afraid of the woods at night? How did you deal with that fear? How did your comfort in the dark woods finally become a point of pride and a quiet pleasure? You remember. You stood at the edge of the dark trees, not once, but night after night and, little by little, you went in until the unknown and seemingly unknowable lifted like morning fog. This is a bit like that. Walk into those dark woods and discover a new kind of secret peace there. Fear is the monster that guards the treasure.    

Welcome to the first episode! Today our letter writer advises her past self about birth trauma and postpartum depression, but also love and hope.   Dear Leslie, It’s only been a year since I was you, but this year is big. Huge. Ginormous. You’re nervous, and that’s fair, so let me start with this. Everything is going to be fine. Your husband’s birthday wish came true. Healthy Leslie. Healthy baby. Let me walk you through this. You’re going to wake up at 12:13 am. Not unusual. You’ve been having trouble sleeping because, well, you’re pregnant, and that’s what happens when you’re pregnant. The baby is snuggled comfortably on top of your bladder and you, quite literally, have to pee at least once an hour. You’ll stand and you will be instantly soaked from the waist down. Here’s what you will think: Shoot. My water just broke. Did my water just break? I peed myself. No I didn’t pee myself! I’d know if I peed myself! Would I know if my water just broke? Yes. My water just broke. What do I do if my water breaks? What you will do is pee, because you still need to pee, then you will check that your suitcase is packed. It is. It has been for weeks. You know how you are. To your relief, you won’t have to wake up your husband. He will be awake, poking around the kitchen for a snack. He will turn to you and say, in mock anger, “What do you want?” His face will remain completely calm when you tell him. Moments like this, big, scary moments, are what he’s best at. This is why, before you knew you loved him and your breaks gave out on a hill, you called him first. Not because he knew anything about cars. God, no, but because you felt better when he was with you, and you needed to feel better. He will remind you to call the doctor. There’s a lot of things to consider when you’re pregnant. You didn’t realize how many things there were to worry about, and I know you can’t stop thinking about the long history, the thousands and thousands of years, of women dying in childbirth. You think of the women hiding themselves in dark, airless rooms, hoping that the restriction will somehow make their babies healthier. You think of blood and heat and fear and prayers. You will think of motherhood, the destroyer, the last act of so many women, and how it is, inescapably, coming for you. You will think about the conversation you had with Jay, sitting on his porch swing, watching his four year old summersault around the yard as he told you that he didn’t love his boy right away, how his cousin and best friend didn’t either, warned him that it might not happen. Jay told you that you just have to endure. You just have to keep going until the feelings come. There were so many things to fear. You had to proceed with the expectation that it would be okay. And it was. You lay, numbed and shaking slightly as they cut the baby out of you. And then he will cry and then… and then. Was this the happiest day of your life? Almost certainly not. It wasn’t your wedding either, that whirlwind of stress and drunk relatives. Your happiest day passed completely unnoticed and unremembered. You probably had nothing to do and did nothing. You almost certainly laid in bed late with your husband. You let a piece of chocolate melt on your tongue. He brought you coffee. Maybe you walked in the woods. You probably spent the evening reading by a fire. No, the day your son is born is not the best day of your life. But the moment you heard him cry, the instant that vibration touched your brain, was absolutely and certainly the most intense sensation you have ever felt, will ever feel. You burst into tears before you could even register what you were feeling, before you had even thought “that is him,” because the fact of him hadn’t yet become fully realized in your brain. The sound of his voice hit your soul before it hit your mind and you LOVED him. It was as if, walking down the aisle, every moment of history and struggle and joy with your husband hit you for the first time in an instant. And then you touch him and he, the strongest creature in the universe, tries to raise his head. So many fears will disappear in that instant. But there will be new ones. He’s so small. Is he eating enough? Is he growing? Is he growing too fast? You will ride in the back seat, next to his car seat with your hand pressed against his side in the dark so you can feel – so you are sure – he is still breathing. You will sneak into his room and lean over his crib because he’s so small and he hasn’t been alive very long and what if he forgets how? But those fears will be different than the big one, the one that comes in a wave of terror as you’re sitting at your desk and he’s far away from you. The overwhelming terror was like looking down and finding a red dot on your chest, knowing a sniper was holding a gun on top of the building across the parking lot. It was like getting a call that your best friend had died. Except no one else knew your friend and so thought your horror and grief was odd, displaced, something they could not empathize with. Here is my advice to you. Go to your doctor on that day. Do not wait to see if it gets better. Do not tell yourself you are too busy. Do not waste a night curled around the child you love so deeply it hurts, crying quietly into his stuffed animal. It’s a strange thing, maybe the strangest thing, to be so sad and so happy at the same time. Your baby is wonderful and you begin to be the bane of the watercooler, forcing your phone into everyone’s hands and giving them updates on inane things like how much eye contact he’s making and the miraculous discovery of his feet. And then, when your coworkers have wandered away and you have nothing to do but go back to your office you’ll feel the tears prick at the edges of your eyes and scroll through photos of your baby for 15 minutes before you can make yourself answer emails. And you will feel like the world is ending. You will feel like it has already ended. You will feel that it is going to end soon and you are a monster for bringing a child into this world, this terrible, eternally ending world. Someone will tell you, when you mention this, that the world has always been ending, which won’t help. Someone else will say “Wait until he’s a teenager,” which REALLY won’t help. Here’s what will help, therapy and medication. Talk to your friends. Talk to your husband. There are so many things people won’t tell you about pregnancy. First of all, try to wear all your winter boots now, because I have very bad news about your shoe size. Yeah. You might as well pack them up. I know. I know. Stop crying. Also, night sweats. Yeah that’s a thing! You’ll wake in the middle of the night soaked and shivering when the baby cries. You’ll rotate the blanket to find a dry patch that might warm you. You crumple another pair of soaked pajamas and throw them as hard as you can into the laundry bin. I don’t even have advice for you. They just suck. But one thing no one mentioned was how connected you’d feel. Your friends have always felt like family, but now you feel their presence in your life like a solid object in the room. You will begin thinking of yourself not just as something who gives love, but receives it, and damn, girl. You are so loved. It’s only been a year, Leslie, so I can’t say for sure, but I’m fairly certain the best day of your life is yet to come, for both of us. P.S. Thank you to Les Hayden for the use of their song Ophelia. If you’d like to write a letter, we’d love to read it. You can submit letters to Letters To Yes, that’s Y E S at gmail. The letter should be between 1000 and 2000 words and can be on any topic. What did you need to hear a year ago? Ten years ago? You can also join on us facebook and twitter at letterstoyes. Letters to Yesterday is Produced by Leslie J. Anderson. Stay safe out there.