Lost in Translation

1.

Yesterday, a friend asked me about something I’d come up with in late 2008: the Letter from Next Year. The basic idea is that at the end of the year, you write a letter from the perspective of you, a year from that point, telling the story of the previous year (in other words, the year you’re about to face). Then, you revisit and revise every so often, seeing whether the letter’s still in tune with your values and intentions, and making any changes – to the letter and to your life – that are necessary to keep things going the way you want them to.

You may be aware that at the end of the summer, my site was attacked by “script kiddies” and infected with a PHP script injection that put malicious Javascript on all of the index pages on my site. The only way I could get rid of it for good was to delete everything on the site and start fresh – and because I was down to nothing, I figured it was as good a chance as any to start fresh here. So my Letter from 2009 was no longer on the site. Thankfully, I’d made a backup of my blogs before I deleted them, and so I was able to track down the Letter and repost it. (You can find it in the links at the top of the site, or just click here.)

2.

Of course, half the point of a Letter from Next Year is sitting down at the end of Next Year and seeing how well it meshed with what actually happened. For 2009, I dramatically underestimated the effect that depression would have on me, and there were a few things that I didn’t anticipate at all, such that we’re in quite a different place than I thought we’d be now that 2010 is dawning.

• I never actually launched smalltownchef.com. I still have designs on it, but I haven’t figured out a way to do it that doesn’t a) conflict with any work I’d do on Nourish or b) require me to do much more experimental cooking than Holly generally allows me to do (she has a valid point; on our budget, if I experiment and screw it up, we have that much less to eat on for the rest of the month). Naturally, because I never launched the site, it’s not showing ads and doesn’t have a single reader, much less a 200-person forum or a cookbook-in-progress.
• I left Butler Hill in June when my contract expired. I stopped drawing a regular paycheck from Johns Hopkins on December 11, although I’m still on the books as a casual employee; I’m basically there for emergencies and in case they want to start up another web survey. I never picked up as much contract work as I wanted to, and the contract work I did pick up I tended to foul up in one way or another, whether due to depression, lack of skill, or just plain procrastination.
• Instead of writing, Holly returned to school to get a BA in professional and technical writing. She is writing professionally now, but it’s as a copywriter and marketer, not as a fiction/children’s author. It’ll come, though.
• Alex is in fifth grade, and while he’s doing well academically, he has a lot of social trouble, and we may have to take him out and homeschool him for a while until he gets over some of his anxiety.
• We did not move to the coast; we’re still right here in Richmond, much to our chagrin. Almost all of our friends have moved or are moving, and we’re still here largely to provide continuity for Alex and because Holly is finishing her degree. We do live in a different house; it’s much nicer, but at the same time a little more cramped because it has much less storage space. There is no separate study; Holly and I tend to sequester ourselves in a bedroom when we need space. And we still don’t have a dishwasher.
• To my dismay, I took up none of the exercise activities I wanted to in 2009, and thus have remained roughly the same size. I’ve tried a few times, but it didn’t really stick.
• To my further dismay, I’m not really writing, drawing, or playing music much these days either. I’d like to, but there always seems to be something else on my agenda that I need to do first, and when I do finish the things I have to do, I just want to relax and not deal with Personal Development. Naturally, I am still playing World of Warcraft, but I only have two 80s and one 70+, and I don’t play nearly as much as I thought I would.
• We never took those vacations, and we still can’t afford to fly.
• As for the income… I don’t think we made half of what I projected, and if we manage six figures in 2010 I’ll be astonished.

Oddly, I expected that that would be harder to write than it was. I guess I’ve come to terms with more of this than I thought. (Doesn’t mean I have to continue the patterns in the new year, though.)

3.

Even though 2009 didn’t shape up nearly like I thought it would, I still think Letters from Next Year are a good idea. They’re more pliable than resolutions, and they’re more forgiving of slip-ups and failures – and since you’re walking into them with the idea that you’ll be altering them regularly to make sure they’re still in line with your values and goals, they’re more useful than resolutions, which are yardsticks both to measure and to rap your knuckles. Letters from Next Year are also inherently optimistic; they’re the best-case scenario of what you want to happen, so they’re more useful for keeping hopes up.

Therein lies the problem: I don’t actually know what I want 2010 to look like, at this point. So much is in flux that I could end up anywhere, and I have no idea which direction I want to face. I’m going to have to think on this year’s letter for a while. Hopefully I’ll have it up by the end of the week. In the meantime, if this has inspired you to write your own letters, please link or post them here in the comments. I’m dearly curious to find out what you want your 2010 to look like.