Why I write letters to my past self and how it helps me heal
The first time I wrote to my younger self, I was sitting on the floor of my share house in Fitzroy with a stubby pencil and a notebook from the discount bin at the corner shop. I was twenty-six, halfway through a panic attack, and tired of swallowing things down. The letter was messy. I told her I was sorry for all the years I had let her believe she had to earn rest. I told her the boy from second year was wrong about her. I told her that one day she would live in a flat with a backyard and a rabbit named Pepper, and that she would drink it slowly.
I didn't plan to keep going. I thought it was a one-off, the kind of thing you do at 2 a.m. after too much wine and a true crime podcast. But the next week, I wrote another. Then another. A year later, I have a shoebox full of them under my bed in Perth, each one dated, each one addressed to a different Katiee Rose.
This practice didn't come from a therapist, although my psychologist in Fremantle has since been very kind about it. It came from the slow, embarrassing realisation that I had never once said to the girl I used to be the things I needed to hear. I had archived her. I had treated her like a draft I no longer wanted to revise. Writing letters became the cheapest, strangest way I knew to go back and sit with her.
In this piece I want to share how the ritual works, what I've learned from writing to younger me, the days I cannot bring myself to put pen to paper, and why this small habit has become one of the gentlest parts of my recovery from anxiety, disordered eating, and the long aftermath of sexual assault. If you have ever wished you could go back and hold your own hand, this might be for you.
The first letter I never meant to send
The letter on the floor of that share house began as a single sentence scribbled in the margin of a power bill. I had been awake for three nights running, jittery on instant coffee, and the voice in my head had grown so loud I could not hear the television. So I wrote the sentence down. It said: You are not the sum of what happened to you in year nine.
Then I wrote another. Then I cried for about twenty minutes. Then I kept writing.
What surprised me was how easy it became once I started. The pen knew things my mouth could not say. I wrote to the eleven-year-old who learned to make herself small. I wrote to the fifteen-year-old who stopped eating lunch. I wrote to the twenty-two-year-old who moved to Melbourne with two suitcases and a secret she could not name. None of those letters were polished. Most of them were barely legible. But every one of them began with her name, and every one of them ended with something she needed.
I have never sent a single one. They are not for posting. They are for the version of me who needed them then, and for the version of me who needs to remember that she survived.
How the ritual actually works for me
There is no right way to do this, but here is how it has settled into my life after two years of trial and error. I sit at the kitchen table, usually early, before the sun gets harsh through the west-facing windows. I make a flat white with the stovetop pot because the machine is broken and I refuse to buy another one. I put on something I do not need to think about, often a playlist of old San Cisco tracks. I open a fresh page in a cheap exercise book from Kmart. I write the date, and I write Dear Katiee at [age].
The rule I gave myself at the start was simple. No crossing out. Whatever comes out comes out. If I write the same sentence three times, that is fine. If I cry into the page and the ink runs, that is also fine. The point was never to produce something beautiful. The point was to put words into the space between who I was and who I am now.
Some weeks I write every day. Other weeks I write nothing at all. The letters are not a productivity habit. They do not live in my bullet journal. They live in a shoebox with a broken lid, and they come out when they need to, like weather.
What my younger self keeps telling me
The strangest part of writing to my past self is how often she is kinder to me than I am to myself. She keeps reminding me of things I had forgotten. She remembers the exact shade of the cardigan Mum bought me before the long bus trip. She remembers the name of the teacher who finally noticed. She tells me, over and over, that I did the best I could with what I had, and that the rest was never entirely my fault.
Lines she has written back to me
- You were not lazy. You were exhausted in a way that no one around you had the language for.
- The body you tried to make smaller was never the problem. The problem was the silence around it.
- Saying no to that man in the band room was brave, and it was yours, and no one can take the credit for it.
- You are allowed to take up space in a room, even when the room is full.
- Rest is not something you have to earn. It is something you are allowed to keep.
These are not affirmations I found on the internet. They are the sentences I needed to hear at twenty, at sixteen, at twelve. Writing them down made them real in a way that repeating them in the mirror never did.
The days I cannot write, and what I do instead
Some weeks the letters do not come. There are stretches of months where I cannot even read the old ones without my chest tightening. After a bad therapy session, or a bad date, or a news cycle that brings everything back, the idea of sitting down to write to my younger self feels absurd. Why would I want to sit with her when the present is already so loud?
Those are the weeks I lean on other things. I walk down to Cottesloe Beach at sunset and let the salt air do what salt air does. I text my friend Jules, who is studying counselling at Curtin, and ask her to talk about something completely unrelated to feelings. I rewatch the same episode of a show I have seen forty times. I do not force the letters. Healing, I have learned the hard way, is not a straight line. It is more like the train line from Perth to Mandurah: delayed, expensive, occasionally stopping in the middle of nowhere for no announced reason.
It was during one of those long gaps that I read sexual assault recovery and finally understood that some of my so-called laziness around writing was actually my body protecting me. Once I got that, I stopped being angry at myself for the weeks I went quiet. I started treating them as part of the practice rather than a failure of it.
Why letters sit alongside the rest of my recovery
I want to be careful here, because I know that writing letters is not a substitute for proper support. I still see my psychologist every fortnight under the Medicare rebate. I still take my little white tablet every morning. I still have a GP who gently asks how my relationship with food is going, and I still answer honestly, which is a small miracle.
But letters have given me something the other parts of my recovery could not. They have given me a witness. Somewhere in a shoebox under my bed there is a record of every version of me, addressed by name, told that she mattered. When the world feels loud and the cost of living makes everything feel precarious and the news makes everything feel worse, I can open that box and read back what I once needed to hear.
What I keep nearby when I write
- A cup of tea that is slightly too hot, because waiting for it to cool down teaches me to slow down.
- The soft sound of Pepper scratching at her litter tray in the next room, which reminds me that small creatures also deserve a clean corner of the world. I learned most of what I know about looking after her from this rabbit care guide, and I still go back to it.
- An old photo of me at my Nan's kitchen in Ballarat, before I knew what any of it would cost.
- A pencil with a chewed end, because perfection is not the point.
- The knowledge that tomorrow's letter can wait if today is too much.
If you have read this far, try writing one sentence to the person you used to be tonight. Not a whole letter. Just one sentence, on whatever paper is closest to you.
