A letter to my younger self: The desires we absorbed and mistook for our own
Dear Travis at twenty-five,
You just started at the factory earlier this year. It is 1997. You left the farm, and you are still figuring out what that means. Your wife is proud of you for making a choice that gives your marriage some structure and some rhythm. Your parents and siblings are trying to understand why you would walk away from what has been built. The church you attend every Sunday has begun to notice that you are less available for as many of the things they used to ask of you. You are twenty-five years old, and you recently did something that will turn out to be one of the most important acts of agency of your life so far, even though you can’t yet see it that way. Right now it just feels like you traded one set of expectations for a different set of expectations.
I am writing to you from a distance you cannot yet imagine. I am you at fifty-two, and I know things about your life that you have no way of knowing yet. Some of what I know is difficult and some of it is beautiful. All of it will unfold on a timeline that will feel much longer to you than it does to me looking back. What comes will come in its own time. For now, I want you to know something about who you are right now, and about the desires you are carrying that you think are yours.
Most of what you think you want at this point in your life was conditioned into you by the systems that shaped you before you had any voice of your own. The marriage you built came out of a framework your church gave you about what a good young man does when he becomes an adult. The version of yourself you are trying to be as a husband is a version you absorbed from watching the men around you perform their roles. The faith you practice was handed to you by your family and reinforced by every relationship you currently have. The picture in your head of what a successful life looks like was drawn by a culture that never asked you what you actually wanted. The specific things you are working toward, the house you imagine buying, the kind of father you plan to be someday, the way you want your community to think of you, all of it came from somewhere other than your own actual inner desires.
None of what you are pursuing is wrong in any particular way, but you should know that it is borrowed. And you haven’t done the work yet of figuring out which of these desires would remain if you took away every voice that had conditioned them into you. What you’re in the middle of, developmentally, is a stage that every human adult begins in, where the self is defined almost entirely by the groups and relationships and expectations that surround it. Your identity comes from what your family thinks, what your church teaches, what your culture rewards, and what your community expects. There is no shame in that since it’s where every young person begins. What most theorists of adult development agree on is that at some point in adulthood a person begins to move from being defined by the systems around them to authoring their own life from the inside. You’re not completely there yet and you’re not supposed to be. But you are much closer to that transition than you know, and the big choice you made to leave the farm recently is the first real step in that direction. That work is coming and it will take longer than you would want it to. And it will produce a version of you at fifty-two that neither of us could recognize as you at twenty-five.
Leaving the farm was the first real act of your own life even though you couldn’t name it that way in the moment. You told yourself, and everyone around you, that you were choosing stability. You were tired of the emergencies, the long weeks of traveling out of town, and the inability to take regular vacations. You wanted a schedule you could plan around. All of that was true, but underneath the practical reasons something in you was refusing to spend your life inside a system that had been designed by other people for other purposes. You chose your own schedule because you wanted your own life. You didn’t yet know that this small choice was the beginning of a larger pattern that would eventually reshape everything.
The factory will hold you for a long time, longer than you think (and much longer than your ten-month stint selling Schwan’s ice cream). You will stay there for twenty-five years, which is not something to grieve. The factory will do for you what the farm could not, which is give you the space and the safety to slowly figure out who you actually are over time. You will make friends there, develop skills, and build a life. And underneath all of it, the internal work will keep going, outside your awareness at first and then more urgently, until it eventually produces the person I am now.
Some specific things you are carrying will eventually be released, and you deserve to know they are there. You believe that being a good man means being available to whoever needs you without regard for what it costs you, that your worth is measured by how hard you work and how much you produce, that questioning your faith would be a moral failing, and that a successful adult life should look a specific way with specific milestones on a schedule everyone around you would approve of. Each of these beliefs was absorbed from watching the world around you, from your father and the men in your family, from the factory and the farm and the culture, from the religious tradition you were raised inside, and from every direction that ever told you what to want.
Each of these beliefs is a desire in disguise. You want to be seen as available, you want your worth to be measurable, you want your faith to feel unshakeable, and you want your life to look successful. And every one of these wants is going to be examined, slowly, over the course of the next twenty-seven years, and some of them are going to fall away, and some of them are going to be reshaped into forms you would not currently recognize.
Your marriage will not last. That is something to know without needing to change anything you are doing now. The two of you married very young, and neither of you had any framework for how to actually connect with another person or how to sustain a marriage over decades. How could you? You each came out of families that had their own patterns of connection and disconnection that neither of you had ever examined. She is carrying her own set of absorbed desires just as you are carrying yours. You are both doing your best, and your best is going to run out somewhere along the way because neither of you have the internal tools to keep building something the two of you have never really chosen for yourselves.
When I look back at the two of you from where I am now, I feel real tenderness for both of you. You were kids, essentially, trying to do a thing that no one had actually taught either of you how to do. There is no blame in what comes. Your marriage will produce two beautiful children who will be some of the great loves of your life. Its ending, when it happens, will be the beginning of a period of grief that will lead you into therapy, and the therapy will lead you slowly toward yourself, in ways that you cannot yet imagine.
The grief you will carry, when it comes, will look different from what you might expect. When you look back at this year, at twenty-five, from where I am now, you will not feel the sharp regret you might expect. You will feel a gentler and more accurate grief, which is grief for the fact that you didn’t know what you didn’t know. You will not blame yourself for the desires you carried. You will understand that they came from somewhere, and that somewhere was doing what it had learned to do, and that you did what any young man in your situation would have done. What you will grieve, when it comes, is the years spent pursuing what turned out not to be fully yours. That grief will be a release rather than a punishment. The release of a framework that was never yours to begin with, so that whatever you build in the second half of your life can be built on ground that is actually your own.
You are doing better than you know. Leaving the farm was much harder than it looked. You came from a long line of farmers in a tradition that comes with expectations that the men follow that same path. Building a life at the factory will be more meaningful than you can currently imagine. Every book you will read, every conversation with a good therapist that lies ahead of you, every hour you will spend journaling, every question you will ask that you were not supposed to ask, will build the person I am now.
I love you, Travis at twenty-five. I love the seriousness with which you are trying to live your life, the tenderness underneath your practicality, and the questions you are already starting to ask, even though you do not yet know that asking them is a kind of prayer. Keep going. What comes next is worth every step.
With love,
Travis at fifty-two
Peace my friends,
~Travis
Up next week: When Your Symptoms Become Your Compass
This essay is part of a year-long weekly exploration of how we become who we are, and why change often begins in places we were never taught to look.
