Dear Me,

Yooo, what’s going on man? It’s me. Well really it’s you if you wanna get technical. Don’t act like you don’t know me bruh. I’m that little guy who sits back in the folds of this deranged brain of yours. Which speaking of the lights never seem to turn off up here and everything……..and I mean everything tends to run at an alarming speed in this establishment. But I stay here rent free so I guess I won’t complain too much. Any who, we should probably have a chat. It’s not like we don’t have the time to now. The entire world is on punishment including you so we might as well hash this out.

This feels weird to say only four months but damn what a year it’s been man. You were in the middle of your little self improvement saga. You finally started going to therapy (I mean I told you to go ages ago but that’s besides the point) and making some real improvement. You told your therapist in those first few sessions that you’d make more of a concerted effort to get out and breathe mother nature’s fresh air a bit more. Honestly I didn’t think you’d follow through with it. But I’ll be damned I’m honestly proud to say you proved me wrong. You went to comic con and splurged on a ton of comics that you still have yet to read. You went to that car show and walked the show room floor in those Paul George Nasa Nike’s with your little brother until your toes nearly detached from your feet. Not even to mention the absurd amount of food adventures you went on, bruh you were truly living life how the creator intended.

And then….BOOM…..the world catches the meanest haymaker right on the chin with this COVID-19 situation and now you’re right back at square one. Stuck in the house all day with good ol me. I’m not sure how you feel but I cherish our time together. At least most of it. I get a nice kick when we have a little chat and it ends in a light bulb moment with you finally having some kind epiphany of about life. Hell I live up here and I’m still trying to figure out how it takes you so long to reach obvious conclusions but as long as you reach the destination then the journey was worth the time spent. Even if your GPS conked out a few times along the way.

Butttttt there are also other times when us spending too much time together takes you and I both down some treacherous downward spiraling pathways that are nearly impossible to get out of.  With the world at a stand still you and I are gonna be meeting up more often than either of us really intend to. So to ensure that it’s not to either of our detriments I just want to remind you of a few things.

I’ve lived up here long enough to know that over these past few years you’ve developed an odd obsession over time. How to spend it? Who to spend it with? What to spend it doing? How much of it remains? But the most important question of those to you is the what. What in the hell do you do with all this new free time that the world has dumped into our laps? With the earth being on an indefinite time out you’re sitting here with an over abundance of time. I know you’re frugal about spending it, you just wanna make sure its invested in the right things. So what are those right things exactly? Hell if i have all of the answers, but I might have a few to take into consideration.

I wish I had some deep philosophical, mind bending metaphorical answer for you here. But honestly man, from the time you spend writing that book that you’ve been stressing your brain over, to the time you spend exercising at 5 AM which boyyyyyy i hate you for, to the time you spend staring at the ceiling doing absolutely nothing. It’s all essential. No exceptions. Listen bruh, there’s no playbook written anywhere for a situation like this. Not one average person wakes up and plans for a blockbuster Hollywood film pandemic to jump out of the projections screen and step foot into real life. So whatever you decide to spend this time doing is one hundred percent cool with me.

Keep working on that book, research, learn, exercise (5AM is a little overkill but that’s just me) and try some new cooking recipes that you’ll probably completely botch the first three times. But also, chill out, put your headphones on, go to sleep, sit on your ass, pick up that controller and bond with all these video games you haven’t beat. Maybe check up on some friends and family too, they don’t really hear from you all that often, tsk tsk.

No one knows when life will return back to normal or if a new alternate normal will have to be established when earth finally lets us go back outside again. Regardless of how you spend that time, no matter what you spend it doing, it’s completely fine to do a little bit of everything, which ironically includes a little bit of nothing.

Your theme of life this year in 2020 was growth. To take the purposeful steps to transform into what you’ve always pictured yourself becoming. You want to make every second count, you want for every second to mean something substantial. At moments time seems ever fleeting, you’ve convinced yourself that you don’t have enough it, even in a time like this. And in that obsession of time sometimes you forget to just cherish it.

Sure these aren’t the best circumstances. But in the process of stressing out you and me over the use of time I think you’ve forgotten to simply covet it. Enjoy the extra silence and the empty gaps of space that used to be filled with work commutes. Use it to grow, use it to relax, use it to laugh, use it to heal. You’re anxious of the future, eager to dream chase and get the proverbial ball rolling. But since the world is at a halt all we can do is use this time and take care of now. The future is a cloud of uncertainty, so for the time being we have to make best of the moments in between then. And eventually when the doors of the world finally let us out to play again you can hit the ground running.

All of the wishful hopes and you dreams you have are probably on the other side of this madness. Just take a few deep breaths, have a little patience and we’ll make it.

It’ll all come……in due time.