From the outside, it just looks like a normal white envelope, plain except for your name scrawled in blue ink. But on the inside, it is a snapshot of your past, a glimpse at the person you used to be.
It’s a letter from your past self. Social Psychology teacher Anne Peacock has students write a letter to themselves at the end of the Social Psychology course, which she mails back five years later.
Although she never actually sees the letters, she hopes students will reflect and think about what is really important and where they think they will be in five years, she said.
“Throughout our lives we’re so focused on the moment that we kind of forget to think about the fact that we are constantly evolving,” she said. “We are a very different person, there are very different things that we’re focused on or obsessing about or interested in, in just a few years time.”
Peacock equates these time capsule letters to reading an old diary.
“It’s like having a journal and looking back and seeing what your former self was really concerned about, and really seeing your growth, or the consistencies: the things ‘I thought I learned about that, and now I’m still dealing with the same stuff in my life.’”
She thinks that in five years people will definitely see some differences from the people they are now, but there will still be some similarities.
“I like that it’s five years,” Peacock said. “I thought about having people write the letter and getting it back around graduation time, but I think there’s something to being away from the high school setting and having different experiences.”
Some of the Youth Educators also have eighth graders write letters to themselves at the end of the YEd program. They mail the letters back at the end of their freshman year.
Former YEd senior Tia Ikemoto and her partner senior Matt Price had their students write letters on the last day that they were in classes.
“I thought it would be a good idea because your middle school self becomes a very different person from your high school self, and Matt and I thought it would be cool for our class to see how much they’ve changed, or not changed, since becoming a high schooler,” Ikemoto said.
Ikemoto said that her favorite thing about the letters are that they surprise people, because most are not expecting to receive a letter from the past.
“I’m sure most people in our class completely forgot about the letters so when they were handed out I think that whatever they wrote would’ve been a surprise and hopefully made their day a little more interesting,” she said.
Peacock said that with good effort, the letters can be very interesting and informative, and that you get out what you put in.
“I can facilitate the process, but it’s really not about me, and I think so much of the class is supposed to be about people thinking about things and doing things for their own growth and learning, not for a grade, or not to impress or shock the teacher, so this feels like a really personal experience,” she said.
Peacock said that although she never got the chance to write a letter to her future self, she did look back on her high school journal when she was in college and saw themes in her life that kept recurring.
“There were things that I was really invested in, that were important. I was really athletic in high school and very focused on each and every game, and now I don’t play organized sports and it’s just not a part of my life, so I think about all that energy and time and where that goes now,” Peacock said.
Junior Chris Fong said he remembers writing a letter when he was in eighth grade. He got his back last year.
“I had forgotten I wrote it, but it was a nice surprise,” he said. “It was interesting to see how much I had changed from my eighth grade self.”