Every year on my birthday, I write a letter to my future self. The tradition started when I was eight – I remember curling up under the heat of my hand-me-down Dell laptop in a windowseat, and determinedly introducing myself to 9-year-old Catie. I write these letters to dream, and to remember. I share my hopes for the upcoming year, and my triumphs and regrets from the receding one. Reading these letters feel like tossing of a baton across time, self to transitive self.
This example comes as close as I think I can get to a thesis for “why” I write. My letters blur the barriers between the struggles of my past and those of my present; much of my poetry is a similar act of reaching across time, in search of companionship. I also think these are the stories that I am most drawn to engage in this kind of timelessness, and embrace the non-linearity of the human experience. Every self who has written those letters sits at a computer, typing away in some corner of the universe, just as every author bemoans their writer’s block somewhere in our space-time continuum. As usual, I think James Baldwin summed it up best: “You think your pain and your heartbreak are unprecedented in the history of the world, but then you read. It was books that taught me that the things that tormented me most were the very things that connected me with all the people who were alive, who had ever been alive.”
There have been times in my life when I naively thought that nobody could fully understand the way I felt. Sometimes, a journal entry from several years back proves me wrong, and reminds me of my own resilience, reminds me that whatever insurmountable thing I’m facing, I have gotten through before. More often, though, I read a poem that encapsulates a feeling I thought couldn’t even be put into words. One of my favorite poems of all time, by the late, great Louise Glück, contains the lines “Whatever/returns from oblivion returns/ to find a voice”. I think reading, and writing, is me trying to find my voice—either in this timeline, or another.
It probably seems hippie-dippie, but in exceptionally happy or sad moments, I sometimes close my eyes and picture reaching my hand out to another self. I try to share my joy with another version of myself who is grieving, and I exchange my sorrow with a Catie who has stability to spare. I like to think of writing as another manifestation of this metaphorical hand—authors across time reaching out to ask Do you see me? Can you feel this, as I feel it and put it down in ink?
Needless to say, much of my favorite writing revolves around the idea of change and transformation – striving for a new future while retaining some kind of connection and tenderness to a past self. This is why I’m so passionate about Sundress’ mission to spotlight trans poetic voices. Trans people struggle with this tension and ceaseless tether between the old self and the new, and navigate it with more depth and gracefulness than most anyone else. I am inspired daily by the excellence and profound insight of these poets, and it is an honor to work with their holy words as an intern here at Sundress.
I’ll close the same way I closed my most recent letter, saying goodbye to my 21-year-old self and greeting my 22-year-old one:
“I hope I keep loving, and healing, and bouncing back. There are glimmers of such light. I wish I could send some back to the author of my last letter. And I hope I get some, on my bad days, from future selves who share my planetary place in the sky.”
Catie Macauley (they/he/she) is a transmasculine aspiring poet living and working in Boston. They study Sociology, Environmental Studies, and English at Wellesley College, where they also compete on the Wellesley Whiptails frisbee team and perform with the Wellesley Shakespeare Society. A Best of the Net 2024 Nominee, his writing has appeared in brawl lit, The Wellesley News, and the Young Writer’s Project, among other publications. In their free time, Catie enjoys boxing, re-reading A Midsummer Night’s Dream , and buying far too many books at independent bookstores – primarily the Grolier Poetry Bookshop, where they are somehow lucky enough to work.