A Letter to Myself, Looking for Something Big

To me, looking for something big,

I'm writing to you at ten on a Sunday night, while you sit on the rooftop with your feet up on the railing. The iced milk coffee you bought in the afternoon has lost all its ice and left a thin brown layer at the bottom. The corrugated roof next door still holds a little of the day's heat, and the air-con compressor rattles somewhere below. Your small notebook lies face down beside the glass. On one page, which you've written and rewritten four times, the heading says "What I want to do with my life". Four times, four different lists, and you've never read one through and nodded.

This afternoon you watched an old friend's story. He's somewhere in the mountains in a rain jacket, standing beside a few dozen children holding saplings. You tapped a heart. Then you sat looking at the ceiling, trying to find something of your own that would measure up to that, and you couldn't, and you felt a bit ashamed for comparing.

Later Quân called:

"How've you been lately?"

"Fine. But I keep thinking, do I just go to work for the pay?"

"Well, pay is a reason."

"I know. But is it a big enough reason?"

"Big enough for who?"

You went quiet. Quân's last question has no answer, and you hung up earlier than usual.

I'm not writing to tell you you're looking in the wrong place, or that nothing big exists. I don't know. Nobody can know it for you, and I think anyone who sounds sure about this deserves to be listened to with some care. I only want to say that a twenty-nine-year-old who doesn't know what he's living for is perfectly ordinary. It isn't a fault. It isn't something to be solved before a deadline either.

I also see where you're tired, and it isn't in the question. It's that you've turned the question into a task to finish, like an end-of-month report. Every evening you sit down to "look", and every evening you stand up feeling slower than everyone else. Maybe the hard part isn't that you have no answer. Maybe it's that you don't let the question stay in one place.

There's one more thing I think you're mixing up. The "big" in "big meaning" is big by whose measure? By someone else's story, by the weight of a title on a business card, or by what you truly feel you need? I don't know what you'd say. I only notice you've never asked.

I'm not telling you to stop looking. Look, if you want to. Just tonight, try giving the question a seat next to you, and then do one very small thing that isn't meant to answer it.

If afterwards those three lines look tiny next to the list of "what I want to do with my life", that's all right too. You don't need to know yet how they're connected.

I also want to add one small thing, because I know some nights this stops being a question. If a feeling of emptiness, as if everything were pointless, has gone on for weeks, to the point that eating, sleeping and going to work all feel much heavier, please don't carry it alone. Talk to a professional. I can't tell where you are, so I'm not naming anything, and this letter cannot replace that person.

If there are moments when you think about hurting yourself, even just in passing, do not wait. Speak with someone you trust, today. The Emergency Support page explains what holds true in moments like that.

I promise only one thing: I won't ask whether you've found it. Next week I'll only ask whether you slept, and whether the evening coffee could do with one glass fewer.

Me, twenty-nine, on the rooftop, coffee gone thin.

This article was created with AI assistance.