I hate the question about what I would tell my younger self if I could go back and talk to them. People usually mean it kindly, but there is something built into the question that has always bothered me. It assumes I am standing here now because I finally corrected whoever came before me, as though the point of meeting that kid would be to hand over a list of mistakes and save them the trouble of becoming me the hard way. I don’t really want to do that. I don’t think the person I was needs fixing from the future.
They were working with what they had. The world was what it was, I was where I was, and there were things I simply did not know yet. There were also things I could not have done much with even if I had known them. Information only helps when you have somewhere to put it, and sometimes the life around you has to change before a possibility becomes something you can actually reach. I don’t feel much need to settle the pronouns of every earlier version of myself before I can be kind to them. That kid was me. They were doing their best with the information, language, fear, access, and imagination available at the time, and I am proud of them for getting me here in whatever shape they managed.
So if I got the impossible visit, I don’t think I would give them advice. No spoilers, past me. I am not telling you who you become, what changes, who you love, what you lose, what your body does, or which things you are absolutely convinced will destroy you and then somehow survive anyway. I would not hand over a map. I would tell you one thing and then let you get back to your life: there is more of it than you can see from where you are standing.
When I was younger, that would have been difficult for me to understand. I knew, obviously, that people got older. I understood arithmetic. I could look at somebody older than me and grasp that time had continued to happen to them. What I had trouble doing was imagining myself inside that future. Depression was part of it. So was the strange distance I had from my own life, where I could make plans and meet obligations without feeling as though I was moving toward anything I particularly wanted to arrive at. The future existed in the same way another country existed: unquestionably real, populated by other people, and not somewhere I could picture myself living.
There were years when getting older seemed less like a future I would eventually reach and more like the edge of the map. I don’t mean I had a detailed conviction that I would never get there. It was hazier than that. I simply couldn’t see much past it. The version of me on the other side had no face. I could imagine a job, a house, bills, responsibilities, all the ordinary furniture of adulthood, but the person standing among those things remained strangely indistinct. I had mistaken that inability to picture myself for evidence that there wasn’t much to picture.
There is an image usually attributed to Isaac Newton that I have loved for years. Near the end of his life, he supposedly compared himself to a child playing on a beach, pleased to find a smoother pebble or a prettier shell while an enormous ocean of truth remained undiscovered in front of him. Newton was talking about knowledge. I keep stealing the image for time.
The older I get, the less interested I am in pretending I have reached some final version of myself. I am still the kid on the beach. I pick up whatever catches my eye, turn it over in my hands for a while, and sometimes carry it with me for years. A record can be one of those stones. So can a book, a friendship, a piece of mathematics, a guitar riff that has stayed with me long after the song ended, a stupid joke that somehow survives every retelling, or a question that takes a long time before I finally understand why I kept asking it. Some things are beautiful immediately. Some look ordinary until years later, when I realize how much of my life has attached itself to them.
Music has always been particularly good at this. I think of it as a way of decorating time. A song can mark a year more precisely than a calendar, and sometimes it collects so much of a person or a period of your life that hearing it again collapses years into a few minutes. For someone who has spent an unreasonable amount of time listening to music obsessed with death, rot, war, disease, apocalypse, and various imaginative ways a human body can stop being useful, it has accompanied an astonishing amount of my actual living. The joke writes itself, but the truth underneath it is that music gave me places to belong long before I knew how to feel at home in myself.
Some of the stones hurt to pick up now. There are songs that carry people who are gone. There are memories I can visit but cannot change, and versions of myself I would love to reach through time and hold for a minute without saying anything at all. I don’t want to warn them away from loving anybody just because I know grief eventually comes attached. I don’t want to protect them from every mistake or loss and accidentally remove half the life that grew around those things. Knowing the ending of a story is not the same as having lived it, and I have no interest in turning my younger self into somebody whose only job is to avoid my pain.
That is another reason I don’t want to give them spoilers. Some of the things I am proudest of came out of decisions I made without knowing whether they would work. Some of the people I love entered my life through circumstances I could never have engineered in advance. Some of the hardest years contain things I would not willingly surrender now. If I went back and started moving pieces around because I had the advantage of hindsight, I would not be editing a manuscript. I would be changing the conditions that produced an entire life, including people and moments I have no intention of trading for a cleaner history.
I can still wish things had been easier. I can wish I had understood myself sooner, that the world had offered more language and fewer reasons to be afraid, or that I had taken better care of parts of myself I only learned to value later. Pride in surviving the life I had does not require pretending I would choose every part of it again. It only means I am unwilling to look backward at the person who carried me through it and call them a failure because they did not possess information I only gained by living long enough to learn it.
When you know better, you do better, but the sentence only works if you let the first half be true. You cannot punish an earlier version of yourself for not knowing what had not happened yet. I know things now because that person kept going long enough for me to find them out. They tried explanations that turned out to be incomplete. They built structures that eventually needed to come down. They stayed in places longer than I would now. They also loved people, learned things, made things, found music, laughed at terrible jokes, and kept picking up stones from a beach they did not yet realize had an ocean beside it.
Transition did not suddenly reveal the whole ocean to me. If anything, it made me more aware of how much I cannot know. I don’t know exactly what my body will look like years from now. I don’t know what I will become interested in, what I will make, which people I have not met yet, what music I will discover, or which ordinary Tuesday will eventually become one of the days I would give anything to visit again. I used to find that uncertainty threatening because I wanted enough information to make the correct decision before I moved. Now it feels more like room.
That may be the largest change in how I experience the future. I am curious about it. I want to know what is out there, not because I expect every part of it to be good but because it finally feels like somewhere I will be. There will be grief in it. There will be repairs, disappointments, bodies doing inconvenient body things, people leaving, plans failing, and mornings when getting out of bed feels like terrible product design. There will also be ridiculous new interests, music I have not heard, people I have not loved yet, things I will make badly before I make them well, and versions of myself I cannot picture from here.
Death metal is full of endings because endings are dramatic. Nobody writes a particularly vicious riff about a reasonably pleasant Wednesday where you finish the laundry and remember to buy toothpaste. Life, unfortunately for album art, is mostly made out of those Wednesdays. I used to think the dramatic moments were the things that gave a life its shape, but I have become increasingly fond of the accumulation instead: another walk, another conversation, another song played too loudly, another small thing learned, another stone picked up because something about it caught the light.
That is what I would want my younger self to know. Not that everything works out, because that is not true and would be a shitty promise to make. Not that they are secretly destined for some perfected future version of themselves, because I don’t believe that either. I would want them to know that the blankness they feel when they try to look ahead is not the end of the road. It is a limitation of the view from where they are standing. The ocean is there even when you cannot see it.
I can see more of it now, although I doubt that means I understand much more about where it goes. I am still amusing myself with one stone after another as they catch my eye. Now I know the handful I can hold is not the whole world. There is more life beyond what I know, more possibility than I can account for, and enough horizon left that I do not need to rush toward an ending just to understand the story.
So, no spoilers, past me. I am not coming back to fix you. Keep the music. Keep the curiosity. Keep whatever strange little things make the day bearable, even when you cannot explain why they matter yet. You do not need to know what is waiting across the water. I only want you to know that one day you will look up from the stones in your hands and finally see how far the ocean goes, and you will be happy to discover that you are still standing on the shore.
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