A Letter to My Future Child
Hey, bud.
I don’t know you yet—and you don’t know me.
Right now, you’re a dream. A seed, waiting to be planted. A beautiful figment of my imagination. Though if I close my eyes and spin my wheels hard enough, I think I’d be able to see you. Or at least feel you.
The date is January 27th, 2024. It’s nighttime. The weather is mild for winter—mild enough for frat boys to be howling from the sidewalk outside my window.
I’m writing this message to you from my college apartment; it’s a single bedroom in an old church house that’s been refitted for student life. The place has its quirks, but the rent is cheap, and the company is good. I live with seven people whom I’ve come to know as friends during my time here.
I’m twenty-two, broke as hell, and scared out of my mind.
In just a few more short months, I’ll be finished with my degree, and I have no idea what I’m doing. It feels like my time to be a bumbling young adult is quickly running out, and I’ll immediately have to collect myself and find a full-time job or else be chewed up and spit out by a cold, indifferent world. But I know this isn’t true; it only feels true in the moment.
I’m doing my best to apply myself dilligently. I pray for God to handle the rest.
Speaking of the world, I want to tell you some things about it.
I’ll have plenty of time to catch you up to speed once you’re here, but I think it’d be cool for you to have a basic reference of how things were at the time of me writing this.
Let’s start with a bit of the good: technology is insane right now, and it’s advanced so much in the time I’ve been alive. When I was eight, we only had one computer in our house. Your Uncle Henry and I had to wait for your grandpa to finish his work day before he’d let us use it. Eight years later—when I was a teenager—almost two-thirds of the world’s population owned smartphones.
Now, we’re experiencing the infancy of AI. The applications are amazing—and terrifying. It will teach you almost anything you ask it to and can assist you with many tasks. It’s being trained to perform live-saving procedures, manage agriculture, and automate vehicles among many, many other capabilities.
This technology is evolving rapidly, and the world along with it to the point I can hardly imagine the scope of the world you’ll be born into. It raises the question of whether humans themselves might fall into obsolescene, or if it will simply help us tap the limits of our potential.
But for right now, the people I know mostly ask it to do their homework for them. I think we’ll be okay—at least for a little while longer.
In scarier news: the planet is melting, we might be on the brink of another global conflict, and our best two candidates to become leader of the “Free World” are an eighty-year-old who struggles to form a complete sentence, and a smarmy, orange businessman with a cult following of Americans radical enough to incite riots on Capitol Hill.
It’s not looking too good.
Because of this, I often get existential about whether it’s right for me to bring you into this world in the first place.
I don’t know whether I’m bold enough—or perhaps foolish enough—to believe in humanity’s ability to heal the Earth, or if you’ll go up in the flames along with us. I don’t know whether I’ll actually get to meet you, or if I’ll catch a bullet to the neck while serving as a conscripted soldier on foreign battlefield.
It’s enough to paralyze me—to make me want to curl up into ball and hide.
Still, I’m able to roll out of bed in the morning. Somehow, as scared as I am, I go on peacefully. Maybe it’s because I have a silly little dream that perseveres in my heart—a dream that my words will reach the people they’re meant for, and it will be the difference that helps them persevere too.
Or, maybe it’s because I’ve finally been humbled enough to fully grasp that my life isn’t guaranteed in the first place, and neither are the people and comforts within it. There are mornings now where I’ll wake up and find myself wanting to break down into grateful tears simply because I’m still breathing.
I can’t say for sure.
However, a certainty I can count on is this: people are selfish and ignorant, and I count myself among them. We make irrational, emotional decisions all the time, and we can never seem to fully agree on anything of importance. As long as this is true, as long as people try to impose their wills on one another, there will be conflict and people will be hurt.
But we also love wholeheartedly; it’s the reason we’re so stubborn in the first place.
Know this: no matter how much fear, hatred, and suffering you experience in this world, there is always room for love—for kindness, patience, gratitude, forgiveness, truth, and understanding. No matter how bad things may get, you’ll find there are joys in this world worth holding onto—glimmers of hope worth protecting and fighting for.
I’m fighting for you.
I want to talk about you now—my glimmer of hope.
If you’re a boy, I’m thinking you’ll be Anthony. If you’re a girl, you’ll be Rebecca, though your mom will have opinions too.
I haven’t met your mom yet. Or, maybe I have met her and the timing isn’t right. But when the time is right, I feel like I’ll look her in the eyes and just—know—you know?
Anyway.
There’s some 22-year-old insight I want to share with you. I’ve been straining to think of the perfect words to say, but if my life goes according to plan, then you’ll probably have millions of words of mine to read from, and thousands more hours to spend in my company nonetheless. I won’t pressure myself to say it all perfectly in one letter, right here and now.
However, there’s one thing I feel the need to explain to you in writing.
It has to do with your grandpa—my dad.
He was strong and gentle—intelligent, but loved being silly too. He had a scruffy, peppered goatee and the biggest, whitest smile of anyone I knew.
When he would laugh, his initial exasperation would sound like a whinnying horse, and then it would resolve to a warm, hearty chuckle deep from his belly.
The two of us used to sing 70’s and 80’s music together in the car; he had a great singing voice, and many people often complimented him on it. We also used to build fires by the lakefront and share many conversations beneath the stars.
He taught me to be kind to everyone because, “you never know what someone’s going through.”
But most of all, he loved me, and I loved him—and I know he loves you too. He had the purest, most amazing joy for his children, and I know he would’ve delighted in being your grandpa.
You’ll find there will be times in your life when it feels like someone is gently squeezing on your heart, and you won’t be sure why, but rest assured that’s just him hugging you; I still feel his arms around me all the time.
I want you to know that your grandpa suffered in silence with anxiety, and it’s nothing to be ashamed of.
On the outside, he was golden; I can’t recall anyone in his life who didn’t find him charming or admirable. But on the inside, his worries often consumed him. He took painstaking care with his words and actions to ensure people in his life looked upon him favorably.
He had a habit of stretching truths—or outright omitting them—because he was afraid to be fallible or upsetting to others. He struggled asking for help and being forthright with his true feelings because he didn’t want to be burdensome, and therefore suffered many of his burdens alone. Most importantly, he ran his mind ragged trying to stranglehold the outcomes of both his future and the people in his life, a goal as futile as beating the ocean into submission.
The reason he isn’t here is because alcohol deluded him into thinking he was powerful enough to do these impossible things. He made poor choices, hurting himself and his loved ones in the process, but this doesn’t make him a villain; it makes him incredibly human, and I only wish I could’ve hugged him tighter.
He never did open up to me fully about his feelings—not even towards the end of his life. We had vulnerable conversations, but I always got the impression he wasn’t showing me the full picture. Besides a few of his journal entries we found after he died, the only reason I can infer these things about his mental state is because his silent battles are the exact same silent battles I’ve fought all my life.
It took witnessing his decline for me to truly understand how I’ve modeled those same behaviors in my own life.
They say alcoholism is a family disease. This is true, but read closely: the alcohol itself isn’t necessarily what we need to be concerned about. The running and hiding—the learned behaviors that makes us feel the need to resort to a self-destructive substance in the first place—that’s the real disease, and those roots run much, much deeper.
So, here’s the deal:
I want you to know that my love for you is unconditional, and you should love yourself unconditionally too.
It’s my job to prepare you for a healthy adulthood; right now, I’m still figuring out how to live a healthy adulthood myself.
There will be times when we argue. There will be times when I scold you and you won’t exactly understand where I’m coming from, though I’ll still try my best to explain it to you. I’ll certainly have moments when my own anxiety influences my judgments, because the real world can be a frightening place, and I’ll reflexively want to protect you from harm’s way.
But even in those disagreeable moments, there is nothing you could say, do, think, or feel that would possibly make me love you any less.
I’ll teach you how to be disciplined and hard-working as your grandpa did for me, and I’ll celebrate just as proudly when you succeed at your passions and academics. But my love for you isn’t contingent on whether you do succeed—understand? I love you for the hairs on your head, not the letter grades on your report card.
I want you to know it’s okay to stumble and fall; it’s getting back up that matters most, and I’ll be here to help you brush off the dirt too.
I want you to know it’s okay to rest when you feel tired, and cry when you’re hurt. If something is confusing or upsetting to you, you can always talk to me about it. You can say anything you need and I won’t judge you; I’ll only do my best to comfort and guide you. In life, there are some battles only you will be able to fight, but it doesn’t mean you have to fight them alone.
Lastly, I wish for you to be brave in this life.
I wish for you to love boldly and vulnerably—to stand firmly for the values, dreams, and people you cherish. I wish for you to cultivate strong self-respect and remain steadfast when others try to taunt you.
This is my true battle right now, and it may be for the rest of my life.
When I say, “I’m scared out of my mind,” this is why.
When I say, “I’m fighting for you,” this is the fight I’m referring to.
But I realize if I’m to ask these things of you—if I’m to break the chain of illness and addiction in our family—then I need to be courageous enough to model this ideal myself, and I am—right now. It doesn’t matter how scary it feels. I want you to know I’m fighting daily to dig up the nasty, anxious, self-loathing weeds in my subconcious, and I’m replacing them with beautiful new flowers. I’m manifesting a bright future for myself and for you—one where you'll never have to worry about me being compromised by factors within my control.
There’s so many people I’m excited for you to meet, and so many things I can’t wait to show you. But until that day comes—and it might be a while—I’ll keep working hard to be someone we can both be proud of.
