This week’s been an emotional one. My 94-year-old grandma is in hospital for the first time, after fracturing her hip falling in her apartment. She’s the toughest of the tough old birds – still rocking life solo in her own apartment, doing her own grocery shopping and with a better memory for things that happened 40 years ago than I have for what happened yesterday.

She’s an absolute force.

And although every Christmas for the last two decades she has vehemently declared that, “You’d better not buy me gifts this year, I may not be around to enjoy them” I think in the back of my mind I thought she was some impenetrable conglomeration of cells and neurons, constructed before food allergies and air pollution could take their toll.

I mean she lived through Prohibition for god sakes! I thought she was unbreakable.

Seeing her lying in the hospital, I was faced with the idea of mortality for the first time in years. Lying there, having to be taken care of for arguably the first time in her life, I know she’s not thinking about the bills she didn’t pay on time or how much of her pension she’s spent.

All that matters are the people in the waiting room.

Isn’t that all we can really hope for after all? To have someone to tell our stories? To be missed when we leave?

So being stuck at home all week with a bad bout of the flu, I have had nothing but time think about what I want my future to look like. We all have these all-encompassing goals – get a career, find a partner, have a couple of kids, and try to live without killing one another. But when we picture these things growing up, the goal careers are often hazy and lofty ideals, the future partners might as well be heavily pixelated faces set atop bodies that we move from life event to life event.

So rather than these over-arching goals, I thought I’d take it down to the specifics. What do I really want my life to look like? Who do I want to become? Who will come along for the ride?

Here I present to you, a letter to the future me.

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Dear old Emma,

How’s it going you wrinkled, saggy little lady?

As I write this, I’m trying to picture what you might look like as you read it; are you holed up in a Toronto apartment in the middle of winter, drinking your 6^th coffee of the day? Or perhaps sitting in a hammock somewhere in a different time zone, warm and sun-kissed, letting a tan cover up the stretch marks from that year you accidentally forgot to go the gym?

Have you found any of that elusive perspective yet? Is life beginning to make sense in retrospect? As you’re reading this, are you able to look back and pinpoint one or two big decisions you made that set life on a different course, or does it all just look like a series of small decisions, seemingly inconsequential at the time, that you laid down like cobblestones, building a path through life.

Has life reached some plateau of stability? Or are you still a wanderer: seeking, imagining, free falling?

I hope you never let yourself be pressured into a job you didn’t love. As I write this, even after just 4 months of trying to live the free-spirited, “damn-the-man” lifestyle, I sometimes wake up with the weight of everyone else’s expectations squeezing the breath from my chest. It’s impossible to not compare yourself to those people who have check marked all the boxes in their life list and seem to float around with this blissful air of contentment.

I hope you’ve continued to remind yourself as you’ve aged that you are not these people; that you’ve never wanted to be.

Do you still wake up every morning an hour earlier than you have to, just to have coffee alone, give yourself an extra 20 minutes to sit in front of the mirror and reflect on what’s to come? Do you still smile at the life you lead? Or do you wake up feeling rushed, discombobulated, squeeze yourself into an uncomfortable pencil skirt and run off to some job that you, “Don’t completely hate and it pays the bills?”

If it’s the latter, you’ve failed me woman. You swore you’d never do that again. So comfort be damned. Unzip the pencil skirt, strip off the button-down, and run.

I hope at some point you learned the art of aging gracefully. There is something so intrinsically beautiful about women who can do that. And it’s an art that at 30 I still have yet to master. There’s that forehead wrinkle I cover with bangs, that patch of skin on my stomach I’ve tried for years to cardio away. Are you comfortable in your own skin yet? Have you learned to love your thighs?

Just remember that all the women you love most are those that unabashedly appreciate the beauty of youth. Those that laugh loudly, radiate sass and tell young women how fantastic they look. The ones who are jealous of youth, or worse cling to it in a perpetual state of discontentment and envy are the people you swore you’d never become. Remember how negative their energy is.

Now go out and tell a 25-year-old girl how god damn pretty they look.

Have you popped out a couple of kids yet? Do you love those little life-sucking vampires more than anything you ever thought imaginable?

I think you’ve always known that even in your most unsure of states, when everything seems up in the air, that kids are in the cards for you; even when you’ve had no idea about anything, you know you’d be a good mom. I mean fuck, at age 30 I still pick worms off the sidewalk after it rains and collect humans like stray cats. I have a sentimental attachment to a bag of Skittles someone got me when I had the flu 15 years ago and full conversations with flies when I attempt to catch them with a cup and a piece of paper.

I hope you still value life, and remain aware of your own ridiculousness. The world is full of hard things, but loving your kids… that should always be easy.

I hope you’ve kept your sense of humor and that at some point you learned to drive you weird city girl. I hope you call your parents twice a week, and that you and your brother have really gotten to know one another.

I hope you’ve had serious debates with your niece about the hottest Disney princes, and continue to unashamedly defend your long-standing crush on teenage Simba.

I hope you still go to live music shows and haven’t once complained about it being too loud. But I also hope you’ve grown enough of a pair to walk up to those people in the front row who talk through the entire set and tell them to fuck right off.

I hope you’ve gotten rid of some of your acquaintances and spent more time on the people you value. Life is pretty easy right now, and I bet from where you’re sitting, you’ll laugh and say I actually had no comprehension of just how good I had it.

Growing up comes with an awareness that for some, marriages will turn into divorces, and friends will start losing loved ones. I hope you haven’t watched these things happen from a distance, or merely offered a polite hand and empty offers of, “If you need anything, let me know.”

No, when your people have hurt I hope you have crawled with them through the war trenches of pain. I hope you have sat in the dark with them, cried with them and opened too many bottles of wine with them. I hope you’ve never made excuses of being, “Too busy” to do this. I hope you’ve managed to be better than that.

I hope you’ve been a good daughter to your parents. I hope you’ve continued to love them for all of their faults, idiosyncrasies, successes, strengths and failures. I mean, how could you not? You learned how to love first from them, and this is always how they have loved you.

And then there’s him. THE guy. This live-in life partner that I adore so much. At the moment, when I think about my future, he’s the one thing I try not to think too much about. Like just the act of planning or imagining a future will make it untrue. If you don’t make plans then the plans can’t fail right?

But here is what I know, without having to think about it too much. Right now, the biggest arguments consist of who ate the last of the goldfish crackers (him), whose turn it is to Swiffer (his) and who forgot to turn off the lamp (ALWAYS him). And you deal with these arguments in a health, mature fashion – by blaming him until he exasperatingly caves and leaves in a huff to go buy more goldfish crackers/Swiffer sheets.

This weird little bubble of relationship bliss is bound to pop at some point. The big fights haven’t even started yet; I know this. The ones that last weeks and leave you feeling emotionally numb; the ones that feel like physical pain.

In the past I’ve been a cut-and-run person. I’ve told myself, “It shouldn’t be this hard this soon.” I hope when it came to him, you chose not to run. I hope at some point you decided to dig your heels in, plant your feet and resolve that what you have is worth fighting for.

I hope when you’ve had the big fights, you’ve managed to remember that this is the meat-and-potato eating Scotsman whose grocery list now consists of quinoa bars and vegan protein powder. A guy whose previous mattress was lovingly titled, “The Taco” by all his friends because it was so soft it folded up on both sides, but who now sleeps on bed comparable to a concrete slab because of your bad lower back.

Remember that for every time you want to smother him with a pillow for snoring so loud, there is a time he has brought your grandmother flowers on Easter or huffed his way through a hot yoga class just to hang out with you.

And sure he talks ad nauseam for two months about needing a spring jacket only to never buy a spring jacket, and complains twice a week about needing a pair of brown shoes only to never buy a pair of brown shoes. But remember that he patiently chased you through the woods for 6 hours that time you thought it a wise idea to do a handful of mushrooms at a cottage. He didn’t even try to correct you when you made him lie with you on the gravel because you were wholly convinced it was made of human teeth.

And I’m sure as we get older, he’ll still have two white dress shirts he interchangeably puts on, then takes off, then puts the other on, then asks which one looks better even though he knows you can’t tell the difference. I’m sure he’ll still put his face way too close to yours when you’re sleeping, so you wake up feeling like someone is attempt to suck your soul through your nose. But he puts up with you being a she-devil at least twice a week, pretends almost convincingly to care about throw pillows and area rugs, and ALWAYS leaves the last bit of milk for you to put in your coffee in the morning.

I hope you’ve remembered these things as you’ve gotten older. I hope you continue to realize that all the things you roll your eyes at are the things you’d miss most about him if he left.

I hope you both chose to stay.

I hope you’ve traveled, and slept in hostels long past the age you’re supposed to sleep in hostels. I hope you’ve been so uncomfortable in foreign places it has made you scream in frustration, because that’s when you know you are truly present. I hope you still look homeless people in the eye when they speak to you, and never bring out your phone on dinner dates with friends. I hope you’ve held onto old photographs, but let go of old grudges. I hope you’ve managed to afford an espresso machine, because that’s going to make everyone’s life easier.

I hope you smile at the life you lead, because it really is just such a crazy, messed-up, awesome adventure.

I hope you’ve done all of this, and along the way, I hope you’ve written it all down.

E.