“Dear future self,
Hopefully you aren’t dreading reading this right now. Hopefully you’re a content, fulfilled person. Hopefully the future excites you more than it scares you. Hopefully senior year wasn’t so bad and the good memories outweigh the bad. Hopefully you’re not too hard on yourself and are proud of where you’ve gotten. Hopefully your skin is better lol and you’ve stopped sabotaging it yourself. Hopefully you’ve learned in an actual classroom, went to prom, and graduated in person. Hopefully you feel ready to be an adult. Hopefully you’ve kept in contact with friends and made new ones. Hopefully your family is more repaired. Hopefully your hard work has paid off, and if it doesn’t seem like it yet, it will in the future. Hopefully your mental health is doing better. Hopefully you’ve done more good for the world and felt good doing it. Hopefully you’ve held onto your hopes and dreams. Hopefully you’ve grown and generated new perspectives.
If none of the above, hopefully you’re confident to f****** take it on.
You can do this.”
This is the letter I wrote to myself at the beginning of my senior year of high school, to open the day I committed to college. As I read it back, I noticed a couple things: 1. okay past me is quite a feisty one; 2. wow I’ve managed to live up to a lot of these; and 3. I cringed at the line “hopefully your hard work has paid off,” among many other moments. (Yes, I did in fact write “f******”). I had used this line to comfort myself my entire life—when I didn’t get into my dream dance team, when the project that was my heart and soul for 8 months got canceled on March 13th, 2020, when I opened a consecutive streak of 9 “unfortunately, due to the high volume of applications to [insert college name] this cycle” letters. But what does it mean, paying off? Have I ever truly felt like my hard work paid off? Or am I just continuously searching for another mountain to climb, another ocean to cross?
Luckily, since I wrote the letter, I did generate a new perspective, both as I looked inward onto myself and outward onto my society. The truth is, hard work ≠ getting good grades, getting into a good college, getting a good job. Sure, you need to believe it helps, but it’s never guaranteed. While this sounds rather nihilistic, I now find it strangely encouraging. Why wait for some amorphous, unattainable, or ultimately unsatisfactory destination, when I can decide when I get there? Why bank on “hopefully,” when I can bank on now?
So, instead of passively waiting for your hard work to pay off, what you CAN control is finding a worthwhile source of fulfillment from your hard work and thereby manufacturing your own happiness, defined on your own terms. For me, this means doing my double cleanse routine at night listening to Conan Gray. It means finally conceptualizing that one math problem on my own, even if it took 2 hours, and bathing in that sense of pride. It means putting myself out there in this here blog post, believing that someone out there would find it valuable.
We obsessively make everything contingent upon numbers. We confuse and conflate vanity metrics—academic, socioeconomic, popularity rankings—with mental wellbeing. (Bonus point: see any parallels in our economy?) Even when we recognize the difference, we often choose to ignore it, because “happiness” has become too nebulous and elusive of a goal to motivate us, especially in a world of endless imposed expectations and impossible conditionals.
I’m here to say that we can change that, one step at a time, on our own terms.
~ Elaine Xiao ‘25
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