Will This Matter a Year from Today?

My dearest incurable humanist,

There are photographs on my phone from ten, five, and three years ago that I can barely stand to look at anymore. Not because they’re painful, but because of the strange combination of recognition and complete alienation. The woman in those images has my face, my voice, my memories up to that point. But she doesn’t know what’s coming. She still believes in certain kinds of safety, in the luxury of taking tomorrow for granted.

I mourn her sometimes. I mourn her innocence, her assumptions, the way she worried about a Contracts Law exam while scrolling through Instagram profiles of people living in New York, romanticizing a life that seemed impossibly distant. She had no idea that within a few years, her father would die, that she would migrate, that who she thought she was would break and require reconstruction.

This week, I’ve been thinking about grief and how it transforms you in ways that often go unnoticed until a long time has passed. Maybe it’s because I’m thirty now that I reflect on this, or perhaps I’ve always been a bit melancholic, but the truth is that some parts of me will never be the same.

I couldn't sleep two nights ago, and in that vulnerable state when your mind ransacks your entire life history, I remembered something my father used to tell me whenever I came to him drowning in worry: "Will this matter to you a year from today?" Most likely, the answer would be no. Then he'd remind me I had nothing to worry about. We spend so much energy on temporary troubles, overwhelming ourselves instead of trusting that most of what keeps us awake at night will fade into irrelevance.

As my mind kept wandering off in the middle of the night, I remembered Mariana (1850–1851), a painting by John Everett Millais inspired by Tennyson’s poem, which draws from Shakespeare’s Measure for Measure. In it, Mariana leans against her window, abandoned by her fiancé. But it’s her expression that captures your attention. She stares out the window, her mind elsewhere, trapped in the ache of waiting and having been left behind. Was she mourning who she was before her loss? Will she care a year from then? The Pre-Raphaelites were known for depicting the inner emotional lives of their female subjects, especially moods of melancholy, longing, and worry.

Mourning former selves isn’t just about loss. It’s also about recognition, acknowledging how much we're capable of surviving and how we can transform while remaining ourselves. The woman I was before my father died was more fragile, more dependent on external validation and the illusion of security.

The version of myself that emerged from that carries different strengths. She's more comfortable with uncertainty, more skilled at finding meaning in impermanence, more capable of holding joy and sorrow simultaneously without feeling torn apart by contradiction. She has a different relationship to time, to love, to the concept of home.

This is the paradox of growth: to become who we’re meant to be, we often must let go of who we were. The strangest thing about mourning former selves is that it never really ends. We are always in the process of becoming someone new, always saying goodbye to who we were yesterday, last month, before we learned what we now know. Each experience, each loss, each moment of unexpected joy, each shift in perspective creates another small death, another transformation.

I think about the woman I'll be five years from now, looking back at who I am today with the same mixture of gratitude and distance I feel toward my pre-grief self. She'll probably mourn certain aspects of my current uncertainty, my current limitations, my current way of seeing the world. And she'll probably be grateful for the foundations I'm laying now and the lessons I'm learning.

Will this matter a year from today?
Maybe not. But today, it matters enough.