SpellWork: Time Traveling to Talk to Your Future Self
Remember that you are your target audience, and you’ll always “get it.” You can be as vague as you want or as detailed as possible. Your voice is yours to create.
SpellWork is a direct reflection of my witchcraft practice. I’m not a traditional witch, and belong to no coven—think of me as a lone hedge witch.
I’ve done this many times, but I didn’t know it when I was doing it. You probably have, too. Open your Notes app or journal, and you’ll see evidence of time travel. It’s in the words you left for yourself in the past. That’s you talking to yourself—whatever the topic might be. It could be a to-do list for this week, and it would still be past you talking to future you.
Fact: Who You Are Changes Over Time
As someone constantly working on themselves, I’ve grieved many past selves. Whether or not you work on bettering yourself, you probably have also done this. For example, remembering your high school days means remembering a version of you who doesn’t exist anymore. And often, remembering is a form of grief—nostalgia is just grieving a past you can’t get back to. A past self of mine was obsessed with a Portuguese word for this phenomenon: Saudade.
When I was managing undiagnosed depression for the first time in 2012, I wrote and produced an EP and named it that. And whenever I feel like listening to those songs, I know that past self of mine is trying to talk to me. “Lately, it’s just been getting worse,” I say in one of the songs. “And I don’t know what to do. I can’t tell anybody.” That is, anybody except for myself.
I am no longer that girl who was so desperate and unequipped to handle their depression that they chose to make music about it instead of going to therapy, but she still exists in my past. And from that far back, she still helps me understand who I was, who I am, and who I am becoming.
Fiction: Time Travel Is Impossible
I didn’t know when I released “Saudade” that I would still be listening to those songs a decade, a dozen years later. But as I grew older, I realized that it was inescapable. At first, it was just re-reading journal entries to remember things that had happened. But when I started performing my music, I obviously had to sing the same songs over and over again—not the ones from “Saudade,” of course, as they’re too personal—and found that sometimes, it felt like my past self was talking to my then-present self. I even do it on Substack. Who doesn’t go through their archive from time to time? Who doesn’t re-read their post when you get a notification because someone liked or reposted it?
Time travel, as it’s portrayed in many works of art, is currently impossible with current technology. You can’t hypnotize yourself and rely on a Western version of magic realism to go back more than 50 years to get to know someone you saw in an old photograph, as Richard Collier (Christopher Reeve) did in “Somewhere in Time.” Or, jumping into Christopher Reeve’s career earlier, you can’t fly around Earth again and again to save your girlfriend. You can’t even step into a time machine and save your dying fiancée, as the time traveler from the H.G. Wells classic “The Time Machine” figures out.
But you can leave messages for your future self—that’s a form of time travel that anyone can do.
Fun: Write for Yourself, Always
What’s the lesson here? Write for yourself, always. Often and with wild abandon. Don’t leave anything out. If you don’t want to be on Substack or any other form of social media—let’s not kid ourselves, Substack is an online social platform—keep a notebook. If you don’t want to write, record voice memos on your phone. Taking photos and making art can also be ways to leave messages to your future self.
I wish I’d taken more selfies over the years because now that I’m older, I’m starting to forget what I looked like 10 or even five years ago. Selfies are messages to your future self, too!
Remember that you are your target audience, and you’ll always “get it.” You can be as vague as you want or as detailed as possible. Your voice is yours to create.
Photo by Zulfa Nazer on Unsplash
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