Thank You Letter To Your Past Self

Practice Gratitude this Thanksgiving By Thanking Your Past Self

Nov 26, 2024

After ending another round of dating in an unexpected and emotionally charged way last month, I found myself listening to Ariana Grande’s thank u, next. When I was younger, I thought the lyrics were meant to be a passive aggressive slight to her ex boyfriends. Now, perhaps because I’ve encountered more of my own life problems, I see it as a beautiful reflection of past life lessons and one part of the song stuck out to me.

She taught me love (Love)
She taught me patience (Patience)
How she handles pain (Pain)
That sh*t's amazing (Yeah, she's amazing)

Grande flips the lyrics to thank herself for going through pain and learning from it. Her lyrics resonated with me because now that I’ve gone through more hard times, I can appreciate my past self even more.

It’s hard when I’m in the midst of anger, grieving or any difficult feeling, to imagine a world where I’ll be happy again. Even if I know logically that I will be a happy, positive person again, I know I have to go through the bad feelings first and hope I don’t get stuck. People often call this, “doing the work,” because diving into our feelings and moving through difficult challenges take effort. The beautiful thing is that on the other side of this is growth. So much growth.

This is what inspired our Thanksgiving episode of Build a Wealthy Spirit where Sammie and I decided to write a letter thank our past selves. The spirit of Thanksgiving is, quite literally, giving thanks. However, I don’t often think to thank my past self.

Sammie and I dive deeper into our letters to our past selves in the episode, so take a listen to here more of our takeaways.

One shared theme for both of us was thanking our past selves for having courage. Sammie thanked her past self for having the courage to leave her job and take a sabbatical. At the time, she was taking a leap and trusting in her preparation, but still unsure how her life would look like doing something that’s against the status quo and without the security of a consistent paycheck. A year and a half later, she thanks her past self for having the courage to leave and prioritize her well being even though there was some insecurities there.

For me, my theme of the year seems to be "tough conversations.” I’ve been pushing myself to stand in integrity and addressing things with my work, family and relationships instead of hoping my problems disappear. I thanked myself for having the courage to have those conversations. There have been so many times where I remember being terrified to have tough conversations. It’s never easy, but on the other side of every conversation was relief and respect for myself. I am a lot happier now because I was willing to push through those tough moments.

Sammie and I found the exercise of writing a thank you letter to our past selves to be super fulfilling. Feel free to listen to the podcast to learn more about our process and takeaways.

Also, if you do the exercise, we’d love for you to share your letter! Just kidding (unless you want to). But we would love to hear in our comment section or in an email whether there’s something that you are thanking your past self for.

Thank You Letter To Your Past Self

Practice Gratitude this Thanksgiving By Thanking Your Past Self

Discussion about this post