Updating my past self on achieved dreams and new-found skills.
Ben Taylor (he/him) // Crew Writer
Alisa Nguyen (she/they) // Illustrator
“Do not read until you graduate high school in 2023.”
I actually graduated in 2022. Math was never my best subject as I preferred silent reading time and creative writing. Speaking of which, let’s not even get started on my bummy hand writing, from which you can tell I’m left-handed. How I expected to express anything meaningful with writing that looks like it was produced by someone left handed I have no idea. I even try to reference this in the first line of the letter.
“Hey Ben! Remember when your printing was this bad?”
Don’t deflect. Self-deprecating comedy can’t save either of us from the grim reality of such tragic printing skills.
“Are you still friends with Max or Liam? Is our dog still alive? Are you being nice to your younger sister?”
No, turns out they suck. Also, my dog is dead and my sister moved away to Montreal.
“What are you doing with youre life? Hopefully good things.”
Bro, don’t be asking me about the state of my life when you can’t even use the correct ‘your.’ And, “hopefully good things” is a sentence fragment, shit doesn’t even have a main verb or a subject to form a complete thought. Clearly, I overcame your lack of ability to formulate questions in a cohesive way. That’s what I’ve been doing over the past eight years. That, and some other sick shit. Grown-up stuff; you wouldn’t get it.
“Do I do anything stupid over the next few years? Yes? Well, no suprise.”
It’s surprise, not suprise, idiot. Your grammatical shortcomings aren’t funny, only a shame for those poor elementary school teachers who had to tediously grade them.
“Did you become an author like we wanted to after all?”
You will soon figure that out after everyone makes fun of you for your terrible grammar when you read your short story to the class. Or, maybe when you fail grade five English for not knowing how to spell. The closest you’ll get is writing for the school newspaper at Vancouver’s third best university. But, it’s cool. You’re cool. Whatever.
“Anyway, I hope your doing good in life now ben, I hope this letter didnt annoy you. Give mom and dad a hug and keep following youre dreams!”
I remember my younger self full of ambition and passion for creative expression. All the years spent playing on the schoolyard with my best friends, some of whom I still know to this day. All the time spent in seventh grade writing short stories for class with my favourite teacher of all time. It floods my mind with happy thoughts.
But then, I reread the sentence. And, Jesus Christ, it’s the worst one yet. No comma after ‘anyway,’ wrong ‘your,’ uncapitalized name, comma splice, missing apostrophe, missed capitalization of proper nouns, repetition of ‘I hope’ and the last straw on the camel’s back: the wrong ‘your’ again.
Your writing is simply too tragic to be taken seriously. If I could respond, then I would. But, unfortunately, you’ve now become a part of me, one which I must exorcize if possible. My main takeaway from this letter is how important digital spellcheckers are. Not only do they fix my piss poor writing ability, they also hide my lousy left-handed chicken scratch.