Dear Past Me,

Congratulations. You are flying high and holding on tight. From the perspective of those on the ground, it seems like you could be floating up there forever, gripping the strings of a colorful bunch of balloons, symbols of success in a society that requires outward markers. One of yours is filled with the confidence of a post-graduation job as a public defender, where you will save the lives of your clients and probably fix the entire criminal justice system while you’re at it. Another balloon is golden, flawless, representing your youthful skin and strapping metabolism. You have a fun side, too, as evidenced by that sparkly balloon in your bunch. That balloon exudes both intelligence and sexiness, the ability to spout off about reproductive rights while sipping whiskey on someone’s unmade bed.

You are the ideal modern woman, despite being held aloft by hot air.

At twenty-four, you brush off thoughts of marriage and children like so many fluttering moths. Concerns like that are for other people, who don’t enjoy the clear skies of obvious and permanent career success. You’ve seen what child-rearing does to the women trudging along below you, those former doctors, lawyers, chemists of your mother’s generation, who thumped down from the clouds, shrugged off their power suits and eighty-hours-a-week careers in order to become gray blobs of forgettable maternity, straggling behind a flightless flock of toddlers.

Take the woman whose children you babysat in college. When you told her you were studying for the LSATs, she sat you down at her kitchen table and warned you. The legal profession demands so much, she said. Her husband was a corporate attorney who worked long hours in Boston. She spoke of the strain his career put on their family, despite their financial comforts. She alluded to the distance in their marriage, the unevenness that emerged between them, the long-festering bitterness.

What did you hear? You heard that tired mother of three saying, “Don’t go to law school. You won’t be able to handle it.”

You showed her. She’s so far under you now that you can barely see the gray strands in the part of her hair.

But there are times when you wobble, hanging up there, unsure of whether this particular flight path should be yours. Remember how you wanted to be an artist, an actress, or a writer, until you realized that the word “starving” was usually attached to those professions, and that smart middle-class girls did not seriously consider them? Security, belonging, acceptability: these are more important than childhood fantasies. Once you graduate from law school, you assure yourself, you won’t even think of those things anymore. Your balloons will squeeze into the homogenous mass belonging to the other lawyers. Huddled in the crowd, you will never have to worry about your identity again.

I watch you shake off your doubts and let your balloons carry you higher, and I worry you won’t reach down far enough to accept this letter from me. Because I’m no longer swinging through the ozone, part of the pack. I left the public defender’s office after less than a year, then bounced around other fields until I realized that it was past time to put my feet firmly upon the earth and reassess. After twelve years of unhappy lawyering, I dug out the repressed dreams of my adolescence and became a writer.

I also stopped trying to impress a certain type of arrogant, guitar-strumming cool guy, instead finding a person who shares my sense of humor, values kindness, and possesses unending stores of patience.

I became a mother, too, a job that, in the past year, has demanded more from me than any office ever did. (I will spare you the details of 2020, but let’s just say, there was no planning for that lightning storm.)

When you look down at me, I know what you see. You see a middle-aged woman who gave up, opted out, failed to lean in—though you won’t learn that awful expression for another few years—and fell from the sisterhood. You think my story, with its reversals, rejections, and insecurities, could never be your story, because you’d never quit what you started. By the time you near forty, you’re going to be a boss in a size-two tailored suit and four-inch heels, hanging on tight and rising higher with each entitled victory. You would never give that up in pursuit of an impractical dream, or motherhood, or anything else that people call a distraction.

But down here on solid ground, I find empathy much more attainable than it was when I was sailing along, held up by all of those self-important illusions, which means I can be empathetic to you. Regardless of the smile on your face and your breeze-blown hair, I know how hard you are clinging onto fraying strings.

I’m here to tell you that letting go is not failing. I’m not a failure, and neither are you, for wanting something different.

It is okay to let go.

Unclench your fist and release those balloons off into the atmosphere. Let them get tangled up in a telephone wire. Don’t spend the decade and a half that separates me and you grasping, simply because that’s what the world expects. Don’t waste your time.

Float on down and take a walk with us.

We are the women whom you judged from on high. We are rehabilitated save-the-worlders, professionals turned foolish dream-pursuers, anxious new mothers, women struggling to answer that loaded question, “So, what do you do?”

After you mourn the loss of your bright and shiny balloons, pause and look around. There is joy here, on the earth, under the shadows of the outstretched branches, the feel of dirt under your feet and the exploration of pursuits that can’t be easily tagged and monetized.

Hand-in-hand with your past self, watch those artificial balloons go sailing off into the clouds.

Point up at them and tell her exactly why you are letting them go.

-Joanna Theiss

Before she became a freelance author, Joanna Theiss worked as a public defender, a trade lawyer, and a health care researcher. Her publication credits include articles in magazines and academic journals, and her short stories have been published in literary journals such as Inkwell Journal and Barren Magazine. Joanna lives in Washington, DC.