Dear Future Me,

You've always known how to feel deeply.  Even when you didn't have the words for it yet.  Back then, it was poems scrawled into notebooks—little places to hold the things no one else could see.  Sometimes it was sadness.  Sometimes it was fear.  Sometimes it was the kind of love no one else understood: for a song, for a moment, for the shape of trees against a fading sky.  It wasn't perfect.  But it was honest.  And it was yours.

You never wrote for applause.  You write to breathe.  But somewhere along the way, someone asked you to read it.  And then someone else.  And for the first time, you wondered if maybe what poured from your pain could mean something to someone else, too.  That maybe you weren't alone in how deeply you felt the world.

It took you years to get here.  Decades.  And still, you're healing.  You always will be.  That's not weakness.  That's the truth of surviving things no one should have had to endure.  The weight of depression.  The echo of anxiety.  The shadowed fingerprints of trauma.  But you've learned: healing doesn't mean forgetting.  It means carrying the truth of it with strength, not shame.

You've also learned something else.  Something darker.  Something deeper.  That inside every person lives a shadow.  A hunger.  A truth they don't always want to admit.  Poe knew it.  You do, too.  That darkness isn't evil—it's human.  It's part of you.  And you've stopped running from it.

So if the world turns against you again—and it will, sometimes—remember this:

You don't have to become what others expect to survive.

You just have to keep being who you are.

Because that is strength.

You don't need their permission.  You never did.

And even if your hands are shaking, you're still writing.

That means you're still here.

With ink-stained resilience,

—You