What the Future self knows

I keep thinking about the person I was twenty years ago.

Not in a nostalgic way. More like I want to grab him by the shoulders before he walks into traffic.

Twenty years ago, I was at the end of a summer that began with me receiving an officer allocation into the Air Force. Before field training in AFROTC, you had to get a physical. That physical revealed that because I had asthma attacks from time to time — attacks that often looked less dramatic than they felt, like a tickle in my throat that would not leave — I was medically disqualified from all service branches.

That was a hard thing to hear when so much of my post-9/11 life had been organized around the idea of service.

My brother had left for the Army that May. Soon, I would see him graduate from basic training in Georgia. By then, I had pinned some hope on an Army recruiter who said there might be a way around the asthma issue.

A year later, in September 2006, I got the call.

My brother Jeremy had been in Iraq for only two weeks when he was shot and killed.

He was eighteen.

That loss did not happen in isolation. In the years surrounding it, my family had already taken several hits. My mother had been permanently disabled in a car accident. My father had fought prostate cancer. My mother’s employer, which had covered her medical bills after the accident, sued us to recover the money. A week before my brother died, we learned we had lost the case.

Then Jeremy was gone, and everything else moved to the background.

Grief became the default state.

For years, I tried to fill the hole any way I could. I wanted to be liked. If not liked, loved. If not loved, at least needed. I spent money I did not have on things that did not matter. I made wrong turns. I lost friends. I forgot to take care of myself.

When I was a kid, before all of that, I wanted to make movies.

The movie that did it was Bill & Ted’s Bogus Journey. That was the one that made me realize movies were made by people. That there were human hands behind the images. Human minds. Decisions. Sets. Gags. Effects. Choices. A whole invisible world behind the visible one.

I wanted in.

Then life got serious.

My mother’s accident. 9/11. The military. My brother. Money. Work. Survival. The dream went into a box labeled “later,” which is one of the most dangerous boxes a person can own.

I finished college. I fell in love. I built a life.

But I did not take the chance when I could have.

I look back now and see a younger version of myself surrounded, at various points, by supportive people. I had stamina. I had time. I had fewer obligations than I would ever have again. I had the means, however imperfect, to make things.

Instead, I looked for a job.

Any job.

Just enough money to pay bills. Just enough money to support my girlfriend, then fiancée, then wife. Just enough structure to call it progress.

I was not building a life so much as treading water in one.

Call center. Cell phone salesman. Waiter. Barista. Waiter again. Cell phones again. Banker. Apartment manager. Nonprofit work. Education tech.

None of those jobs are shameful. Work is work. Bills are real. Survival counts.

But none of them were filmmaking.

For fourteen years, I talked about making a movie about my brother. I had false starts. I went back to school. I tried to learn how to tell stories. I tried to turn pain into structure and memory into scenes.

Then I found myself in my late thirties, morale decimated, wondering whether I had waited too long.

That is the trap.

You lose time, then punish yourself for having lost it, which costs you more time.

You look at the years behind you and say, “If I had started then, I would have something now.” Then you fail to start now, guaranteeing that some future version of you will say the same thing about today.

COVID, for all the horror and disruption it brought, gave many of us a forced encounter with ourselves. The calendar got weird. The noise dropped. The usual excuses lost some of their shape.

I started asking a brutal question:

What would the fifty-two-year-old version of me beg the thirty-seven-year-old version to do?

Probably the obvious things first.

Run more.

Eat better.

Take care of your body.

Take care of your mind.

Stop spending money trying to fill a hole that cannot be filled with packages.

Stop worrying so much about whether people like you.

But after that, I think he would get very clear.

Make the work.

Not talk about making it. Not organize your life around someday being ready to make it. Not wait for the perfect group, perfect camera, perfect draft, perfect emotional state, perfect financial stability, perfect permission.

Make it.

Every movie I love has a few things in common. A main character with a fatal flaw. A pressure that exposes it. A decision that forces transformation.

For too long, my fatal flaw was fear disguised as practicality.

Fear of losing everything made me lose years.

Fear of failing kept me from finishing things.

Fear of dying without having done anything made me freeze in place, which is one of the easiest ways to do nothing.

I cannot change the lost years.

I can change whether I keep losing them.

That is the thing the future self knows. Not because he is wiser in some mystical way, but because he has the one perspective the present self cannot access yet: consequence.

He knows which excuses aged badly.

He knows which risks would have been worth it.

He knows which ordinary Tuesday was actually the beginning of a different life, had I treated it that way.

Fifteen years from now, I will be older either way.

That part is not optional.

The only question is whether I arrive there with another decade and a half of explanations, or a body of work.

So I am trying to listen to him now.

The future self is not coming back to save me.

But maybe he can warn me.