What if we all wrote a letter to our future selves?

I invite you to write a letter to yourself.

It does not have to be profound, nor an act of confession, nor even arrive at any resounding conclusion. What I invite is less message than method.

At a time when censorship, anxiety, cultural fractiousness, and social division are creating noise that is increasingly diminishing our ability to talk and listen openly to one another. When many of us are at risk, or feel threatened, to speak openly, and have lost our platform to engage, to hear other’s minds, and in doing so know our own, I ask what might come from creating that space from within. How might a letter to oneself ensure that dialogue is kept alive?

So I invite you to write; to see what you think before you are able to say. I invite you to write your hopes, your beliefs, your doubts, your contradictions, not to assert but to participate. I invite you to a conversation with yourself, to anticipate the possibility of being changed by the encounter. To be the writer who gives form to feelings that are inarticulate and overwhelming, and the reader who makes the uncertainty more legible, and perhaps even hopeful.

And what might happen if we all wrote to ourselves? To use language that today is so often weaponised to divide, instead, to become a meeting place of disagreement and solidarity. It might not hold any hope of utopian harmony, but ensure a space between us in which friction and plurality can still exist. A letter to oneself does not promise hope but performs it. It opens the possibility that language can still carry care forward, that conversations begun in solitude might one day populate the silence with others.

See Ernesto Rogers‘ ‘Letters to Himself, 1938