A letter to the future
Eight years gone by showing plans are overrated.
Prologue
It’s October 28th, 2014.
I just learned about futureme.org, a service that lets you send an email to yourself from today to a date in the future: 1 year, five years, ten years, your call. The minimum is six months, so they don’t become a to-do email alternative. The service is free, so I decided to try it.
I sent a message for myself to be received in 2015. There, I wrote about my current life, what had been going on, and my expectations for the following year. The message ended up having around 1300 characters (236 words). I pressed "send" and completely forgot about it.
It’s November 21st, 2022.
A new email bounced up in my mailbox, titled "A message from the past." I read it with a smile, and tears filled my eyes. So much has changed!
I always forget about this email. When it comes, I know it’s time for self-evaluation to understand where I am, where I was, where I want to go — and how plans have minimal meaning. The last email — 2021 to today — has about 7200 characters (1311 words), more than five times the first email’s size. I got verbose as the years went by.
The total content — with all the letters from 2014 to today — has whopping 37 thousand characters (6874 words).
In the 2019 letter, I say I wanted them to become a blog, but it’s… too personal. I say names when talking about friends and disclose values about money. But, in a summarising exercise, I’ll list the main changes from one year to the next.
My purpose with this issue is to show everyone that a lot can change in one or two years. This list can be a cautionary tale of sorts.
Also, I’ll share the main points of the current letter to the future — to 2023 — so we can look at it together and laugh if everything goes the other way in the coming 12 months.
Summary
So, if you are pondering now if you should read about my journey, I’d like to share a few points that might entice you. In these letters, I talk about:
Changing careers almost four times during these six years.
Being single.
Being married.
Being divorced.
Seeing a project starting, growing, and dying.
How friendships are born (and, sometimes, slowly murdered).
How you lost a fucking ton of money investing badly
Moving houses almost yearly
Expectations
I put the values of characters and words of every letter in a chart so we could see it better.
As seen below — or here, in a mobile-friendly and interactive version — the letters have grown a lot since their beginning, having their peak in 2019. Reading all of it to write a new letter is no simple task — I’ve done the math, and I take approximately 25 minutes to read it from start to finish. I’ve done it several times, trying to prepare what I’ll write for the following year.
This letter is not a promise of what I’ll try to achieve, but a clear report of current expectations. It’s less about what I think I’ll be doing this time in 2023 and more about what I wish I would be doing.
“Expectation” is a strong word, but it’s the chosen one by me — and accepted by my therapist — when talking about this annual custom.
Happily, I’m very good at exceeding expectations — and shattering them to the ground.
Analysis
The 2018 to 2019 issue introduced topics — the number of subjects was getting out of hand. I’ll follow them here and extract some related information from the dates before their introduction to make this report more organized.
The subjects are Romance & Sexuality, Work, Home, Music, Money, Health, Self-Esteem, Projects, World, Family, and Friends. I won’t talk about them, except if you ask in the comment box. As it says in Matthew, Ask, and it shall be given unto you.
Romance & Sexuality
Daia and I were happy boyfriend-and-girlfriends. We had plans to move together but didn’t have the money or my family's approval.
We got married without any ceremony or party, as we barely had money to pay our bills. We adopted two cats: Pizza and Ice-Cream.
Our relationship was great; we were excellent partners to each other and supportive of occasional crises — family illness and unemployment being two of them.
Daia and I divorced after discovering our goals were different and that we’d be happier by ourselves. What was a happy marriage became a happy friendship, supportive and present. After the divorce, I discovered more about my non-monogamic personality and was (wrongly) in love with [redacted]. I started going to sex parties, making them a crucial part of my life and realized I wasn’t straight but bisexual.
My relationship with [redacted] was a bomb of problems and trauma. I was, on the other hand, starting my relationship with Janine. The sex parties were more frequent, and I studied and discussed non-monogamy even more — discovering relationship anarchy.
Janine and I had a happy non-monogamic relationship — even with all the scars [redacted] left. Sadly, I was sexually abused during a trip, and everything about my sexuality broke into pieces. Together with antidepressants, this killed my libido.
I gained 20 kilos, and the pandemic started, so sex was almost like an old friend. I ruined my romantic relationship with Janine and wished we could become at least friends. My sex-party organizer career had started, and, even being very successful with it, I had to pause this pursuit because of covid.
Janine and I became best friends. I got involved with many people, having skyrocketed passion for some and, as what goes up goes down, tragic endings. On the other hand, I met Giselle and met Marina again. I keep doing orgies but know this will end (see Work; 2021).
If 2021 was a bounty for love and sex, 2022 was a desert. I spent about seven months without sex in Germany, and that’s not the worst: I miss being touched — a hug, a caress, some carinho na bunda. I traveled to Paris to see Marielle and later met two people (names redacted); I still don’t know what will be of them. Also, I am writing this on the day of my first sex-positive party in Munich — maybe it will be good. I’m fucking nervous.
Work
I worked as a layout designer at Folha de S.Paulo, Latin America's most prominent newspaper. The pressure and stress of the newspaper killed most of my love for design.
I was still a designer but moving areas. My first development experiences started while fiddling with Adobe Edge and Adobe Muse, doing part-time layout design and part-time data visualization.
I worked full-time with HTML, CSS, and Javascript. Constantly afraid of the mass layoffs (as River Song says: spoilers), I thought about enrolling in a Project Management post-graduation course.
I enrolled in the course and hated it. At my job, I was fully immersed in code.
Five years of Folha, full-time programmer, some fear (and hope) of being fired in a mass layoff. This year, I traveled for work in exchange for a magazine story to the same hotel I had my first kiss 15 years ago.
You were fired in a mass layoff, got the severance money, and enrolled in a programming BootCamp. Your dream? Open a satirical demon-themed bar called Belzebar.
You are a front-end developer and UI/UX designer at a startup. You love your job and continue studying management on the side — you never finished the post-graduation course after being fired.
The startup I worked for started failing soon after I left for one of the best companies I’ve ever worked for — Seasoned. From 2020 to 2021, my salary doubled, then I got the invitation to work for a German company — making almost four times (in my currency) what I was making at the time.
I’m working and living in Germany, having a great experience at a great company. I have a lot of fear and second-guess many choices, but I’ve been growing a lot as a professional. I have [redacted] plans, but I’ll have to wait for the 2023 letter to know if it worked.
Home, sweet home
I lived with my family in Arujá, a small city north of São Paulo, Latin America’s second-largest city. Our house was big and spacious, and I felt like I didn’t belong there.
My home is a ~100 m² apartment full of plants and Daia’s hand-made decorations in downtown São Paulo — Alameda Glete, in Santa Cecília.
I still live in Alameda Glete. The surroundings are more dangerous than I thought, and living in São Paulo downtown is getting more and more complicated.
I lived briefly with my brother in Arujá and later in Copan — one of São Paulo’s postcards — in a ten m² room. I planned to move to a larger apartment as soon as I could.
I was living in Rua Apa, in Santa Cecília, in front of my favorite bar — a perfect locale for dates, as the “hey, let’s go to my place” was solved by crossing the street. This apartment had 55 m² and faced Marechal Deodoro plaza.
I moved in with Janine in a 120 m² apartment, near Marechal Deodoro plaza, still in Santa Cecília. We were partners but had separate bedrooms — I highly recommend this setting. As a first-floor apartment, we had some backyard — I highly not recommend this setting.
I lived in a closet. My house was a 28 m² apartment in Rua Azevedo Marques, 200m from our last apartment and directly in front of Janine’s — our arrangement of separate rooms became separate apartments altogether.
I lived in São João Avenue, in a 50 m² apartment facing an abandoned movie theater. Even loving this apartment and, for the first time, feeling like I was settling down in a home instead of a house, I was already planning to move. This time, move countries.
After painful six months in a 25 m² apartment — three months having no electrical energy in the bathroom — I moved to a beautiful 55 m² apartment in Pasing, Munich, Germany. I have a balcony, love my floor, and want to decorate it with my paintings and drawings — sent from Brazil — and grow some roots.
That’s all (for now)
I won’t bore you with more personal details for more. As I said above, this was an attempt to show how, from one year to the other, my whole life changed drastically — from getting married to divorcing, from being a designer to becoming a programmer, and I didn’t even talk about my father and stepmother deaths while all of that happened.
If you want to read more about these details, leave a comment.
I hope you enjoyed this lengthy oversharing and that you also start sending yourself letters to the future.
I used to have a pretty stable life in so many regards and I slowly threw that out the window, aspect by aspect, and I kind of wish I had written myself a bit more throughout these years. I don't think I'll go with the emails, but this made want to go back to having a diary hahahahhaThanks for sharing <3