Writing the Stories of Our Future Selves

It is that bittersweet time of year, the end of summer and, for many of us, back to school. And for a large number of young people, almost 15 million across the country, this means going back to college. As a college professor for more than 40 years, this time of year was always my favorite—a time that felt more than anything else like hope. As I met my new students and started new classes, there was always excitement in the air, a sense of new beginnings, of creating new pathways and launching into the future. Yet there was also apprehension and worry, especially in tumultuous times. For young people on the brink of adulthood, the future looms large in both positive and negative ways; they ask the perennial questions: Who am I, and who do I want to be? How will I get there? And for those of us who are parents and teachers, How can we help them?

Emory Morsberger, a successful Atlanta businessman, provided some advice for parents of first-year college students in the Atlanta Journal Constitution. For him, college can be a time to reinvent yourself, to explore the world around you, to challenge yourself, and to become the person that you aspire to be. For parents, he advises providing messages of love and support but allowing their children to explore on their own, to make their own mistakes, and to figure out for themselves how to recover from them. My colleague at Emory University, Marshall Duke, gave much the same advice in his famous “Parenting a College Student” speech that he gave every year to parents moving their children into first-year dorms. Provide love, but let this be a time for your children to spread their wings, to become their own person.

The Future Self

That's good advice, but how do any of us do this? How do any of us become the person we want to be? How do we even know who we want to be? The notion of “us in the future” or what psychologists have called “the future self” is not constructed out of thin air—it grows from our sense of who we are in the present and who we have been in the past, what Dan McAdams calls a narrative identity. We have myriad experiences in our lives, but how we put these experiences together into a story—a story of the experiences that matter and why, and the experiences that made us who we are and set our values and beliefs—constitutes our sense of self. And they provide a foundation for our future self—who we want to be.

But it is not only our own experiences that set this foundation. As Marshall Duke and I have shown in our research in The Family Narratives Lab, young adults construct a sense of who they are—and maybe especially who they want to be—from family stories, stories about parents and grandparents, growing up, making choices, getting jobs, meeting spouses, and living life. These intergenerational stories, stories of trials and triumphs, provide models for how to live and how to be a person. For many young adults, these kinds of intergenerational family stories provide aspirational models; for some, perhaps they provide a model of how not to live a life. Either way, family stories provide the grist for the mill of creating one’s own future self.

So, how can we help our young people challenge themselves to explore, to aspire, and to create positive future lives? Certainly, we can share our own stories with them—whether we are parents, aunts and uncles, or teachers and mentors. We can alleviate anxiety by telling of our own struggles in young adulthood. We can encourage active exploration by telling our own stories of finding meaning in unexpected places as we pursued youthful opportunities. We can reassure them that the route to productive adult life is rarely a straight path, but the journey is worth it.

Writing a Letter

And we can ask young people to reflect for themselves in more deliberate ways. One promising technique is writing a letter to your future self. Melissa Kirsch writes in the New York Times about the process of writing a letter to your future self, to your self in a year or 5 years, and sealing it away until that time comes. This can be a group process, providing a letter to a group member who then mails it back to you at the appointed time, or you can simply stash the letter away yourself.

Another of my Emory University colleagues, Steve Nowicki, used this technique in a senior seminar he taught for years. He had students write a letter to themselves 10 years in the future—and then he actually mailed them out 10 years later! He did this for a decade, and the response was amazing: Many of his prior students wrote back with tears and joy and told how writing that letter helped them shape their understanding of who they wanted to be. Most, of course, led lives that had diverged in unpredicted directions. But writing the letter in college to their future self had helped them crystallize their values and priorities. Indeed, Elizabeth Wetzler and David Feltner found that using this assignment with their students at the U.S. Military Academy helped their students become more grateful and prepared for leadership positions.

Can we write ourselves into the future we want? Certainly not completely. But writing a letter to our future self can help us reflect on who we are in the moment, what is important for us, and why. It can help us reflect on our foundations, how we became the person we are through our own experiences and through the experiences of our families and loved ones. And this process can help us make decisions and choices in the present that will set the stage for our future. Our future self is not written in stone but is marinated in the past, our own and the intergenerational past.

As so many young people start their journeys toward adulthood, let’s help them become the adults they want to be—reflective, steeped in personal and family history with an eye toward the future. Let’s share ourselves by sharing our stories, both good and bad, as we strive together for a better future. And let’s help make that future real by writing ourselves into it.