There is something profoundly intimate about writing a letter to yourself. The pen hesitates over the paper, or the fingers pause over the keys, as you work out how to address the person you know best and sometimes understand least: you.
I recently came across a book called “Dear Me,” and found myself caught by its premise. An honest conversation with yourself across time opens doors that other kinds of reflection leave shut. It also turns out to be far harder than it sounds. Writing to your past self, you want to reach back and comfort him, and you cannot change a single thing that is coming for him. Writing to your future self, you confess your hopes and your fears to someone who will read this one day and quietly measure whether you became the person you promised to be. There is nowhere to hide in a letter addressed to yourself. Maybe that is exactly why it works. So I started writing my own, backward to who I was and forward to who I might become.
Looking Back to Look Forward
Futures thinkers call it retrospective futurism: standing in an imagined future and looking backward to trace how you arrived there. It reveals where you might go, and also how the path unfolds, which obstacles appear, and which small decisions turn out to be the pivotal ones.
So today I am writing to myself at two points: the version who arrived in Morocco in December 2020, wide-eyed and uncertain, and the future version who has moved beyond the crossroads where I currently stand. I am a little afraid of both letters, which is how I know they are worth writing.
Letter to My Past Self
Dear 2020 Me,
You are standing in Istanbul airport right now, exhausted and anxious, phone clutched in your hand, replaying the encouragement that sent you this far. You are wondering whether leaving a stable job at Olam during a global pandemic was the most foolish decision you have ever made.
I wish you could see what I see now.
That sweltering day in Ilorin when the acceptance email from UM6P arrived still feels vivid. Three years as a packaging supervisor had nearly worn your spirit down, the mechanical drone, the shouted instructions, the relentless pace. Your Bachelor’s in Crop and Environmental Protection felt increasingly distant from your daily reality, and that application for an MSc in Collective Intelligence felt like a moonshot.
Yet here we are.
That agricultural background that seems so disconnected from your programme will become the foundation of insights no one else in the room can offer. The ecosystems you studied will turn out to be the clearest way you have of understanding the human networks you are about to spend years thinking about.
You will not make the crossing alone. Two fellow students will become close companions, and together you will make the unbearable bearable and the foreign familiar. You will work out everything between you, from the cheapest groceries to the maze of university bureaucracy. Hold those friendships tightly. They are carrying more weight than you realise.
The journey from Casablanca to Benguerir will show you landscapes unlike anything in southwestern Nigeria. The UM6P campus will appear as a careful blend of modern architecture and traditional Moroccan influence, and your window will look out on olive trees that become familiar landmarks in a new life.
The language barrier that terrifies you will never fully disappear, but you will develop a confidence in navigating it that surprises you. French will become less a wall and more a door, ajar if not yet wide open.
There will be an internship back in Nigeria’s troubled north, and it will turn dangerous. Trust your instincts when the time comes. The detour to the southwestern region near Iseyin will feel like failure and will quietly give you perspective you could not have found otherwise.
When you return to Morocco, the job search will test you severely. Rejection emails will accumulate, savings will dwindle, and you will lie awake calculating how long you can keep trying before giving the dream up. Then an interview will change everything: the Africa Initiative at UM6P, looking for an Outreach Officer. The strange combination of experiences you carry will finally read as an asset rather than a liability.
Above all, hold on to this. The displacement you feel is the beginning of your greatest strength, the ability to stand between worlds and build bridges other people can cross. You are a seeker, a traveller, an eagle above storms. When difficulty rises, rise higher. The patterns invisible from the ground become clear from above.
Letter to My Future Self
Dear Future Me,
As I write this, I am sitting on my balcony in Benguerir, watching another Moroccan sunset rearrange the landscape. The light here does not fade so much as change, gold to purple to deep blue. I wonder where you are watching the sunset now.
I feel the stirrings of change again. The desert has taught me to recognise the signs, the subtle shifts that come before a larger transformation. The work I do now, coordinating sessions, organising events, keeping the department’s website alive, producing the weekly newsletter, feels fulfilling and somehow transitional at once, as though it is preparing me for something it is not itself.
I wonder whether you have found the balance we have been chasing: work that means something and a life that holds together around it. Have these years added up to the future we were hoping for? Have you kept the connections formed here while building new ones wherever you have landed?
I hope you have kept the habit of documenting everything. These years in Morocco have convinced me that our story is not only ours. It is a map someone else might follow. The distance from a packaging line to international collaboration is more than geographic. It is a set of possibilities that people in the position you started from are rarely shown.
Do you still think about the tagines in the university cafeteria? The mint tea poured from an impossible height? The Friday couscous that became such a dependable marker in the week, or the call to prayer with its particular Moroccan cadence that gave structure to chaotic stretches of time?
Whatever continent you stand on as you read this, hold on to what this place taught us. Resilience is less about enduring hardship than adapting to it. Knowledge is less a pile of facts than a changed way of seeing. And home turns out to be wherever we manage to make meaning, rather than any fixed point on a map.
Most of all, I hope you are still a seeker, still a traveller, still an eagle above storms, never settling for a comfortable answer while an important question is still open.
What the Letters Revealed
Writing these has shown me something I could not see while living through each stage: the threads connecting my past, present, and future form a pattern more coherent than it ever felt in the moment. The challenges that seemed random while I was inside them, leaving Nigeria, learning a new culture, the language, the security scare, the months of unemployment, now read as necessary steps in a journey that hangs together.
The practice is more than therapeutic. It surfaces the underlying narrative of a life, the story as you live it from the inside rather than the version other people would tell about you. We are, at once, who we have been and who we are becoming, standing where memory meets possibility.
The desert teaches that landscapes change gradually, then suddenly. Sand shifts imperceptibly until one day the dunes have completely rearranged themselves. Lives may work the same way, changes accumulating quietly until you look up and find yourself somewhere new. Whatever transition you are in the middle of, you can rise above it far enough to see the pattern that turbulence hides.
If you are reading this, future self, I hope you are gentle with the person who wrote it. He was doing his best with what he could see at the time, on a balcony, at dusk, a long way from where he started, trying to be honest with someone he had not met yet. The story keeps unfolding, one letter to yourself at a time.