Dear Younger Me: What I Know Now That I Wish You’d Known Then
There’s a woman in her late thirties I keep thinking about. She’s me, but I barely recognise her. I’d like to tell her a few things.
You think the spinning is the point. You think the speed, the fullness, the sheer relentless motion of your days is proof that you’re living well. There’s a school run that bleeds into a deadline that bleeds into a hospital visit for Mum, and somewhere in between you are filing copy and returning calls and making dinners and holding it all together with both hands and a jaw that never quite unclenches. You are moving so fast, younger me, that you can’t feel your feet on the ground. You haven’t felt them in years.
There’s a myth — an old one, retrieved from the dark and dusted off by the brilliant Clarissa Pinkola Estés — about a girl and a pair of red shoes. She puts them on, and she begins to dance. And she cannot stop. Not for rest, not for grief, not for love. The shoes carry her through village and field and forest, relentless and glittering, and she dances and dances until dancing is no longer joy but compulsion, until the steps are no longer hers but the shoes’. The shoes, Estés tells us, are what happens when a woman becomes separated from her own soul — when she has learned to perform her life instead of living it. When productivity has become identity. When stopping feels like death.
I see you in the early morning, already working before the house wakes up, already behind before the day has begun. I see you at the school gate, late, we were late every morning and still mentally composing an email. I see you at your parents’ bedside, present in body but already tallying the hours, already calculating what you’ll miss, already guilty about both the time you’re spending and the time you’re not. I see you eating standing up at the kitchen bench, calling it efficiency. I see you telling yourself that once this deadline passes, once this particular season of hard things eases, then you will rest. Then you will breathe. Then you will feel like yourself again.
Because here is the thing nobody tells the women of our generation, the ones who were raised to be capable and competent and endlessly, impressively good and always “fine”: the doing is not the problem. The love you pour into your work, your children, your parents — that is real and it is beautiful. The problem is the belief buried beneath all of it, the one you’ve never said out loud,
the one that runs the whole show. The belief that your worth is the sum of what you produce. That love must be earned through effort. That if you slow down, if you loosen your grip even slightly on all the things you are holding, something terrible will happen. Someone will see that you are not, in fact, holding it together at all.
One day, your body — exhausted and ignored and pushed well past what any body should be asked to bear — will make the decision you couldn’t make yourself. You will find yourself in a hospital bed, on the wrong side of a diagnosis, staring at a ceiling with nothing in your hands. And later, much later, you will understand that this was not a punishment. It was a beginning. But I’m getting ahead of myself.
You are not behind. You have never been behind. The measuring stick you are using was not made for you — it was handed to you, and you grabbed it without thinking because everyone around you was holding one too.
Your sensitivity is not a liability. The way you feel everything, the way you carry the grief of your parents’ aging like a stone in your chest, the way a piece of good writing can stop you cold on a Tuesday morning — that depth is not weakness. It is the exact instrument you will one day need. Don’t sand it down trying to be more efficient.
Your worth is not your output. I know you know this intellectually. I know you could write those words in your sleep. But knowing and living are different countries, and right now you are living in the other one. You are producing your way through days that are asking you to feel your way through them instead.
The girl in the red shoes dances until she has to make a terrible choice — and then, only then, does she finally, blessedly, stop. She rests. She grieves. She finds her own feet again.
You will get there too. Not through discipline or another item on a list of self improvements. But through the slow, unglamorous, work of letting go. Of releasing your grip on outcomes and timelines and the particular shape you have decided your life must take. Of trusting — and I know this is the hardest sentence you will ever read — that you are held even when you are not holding.
The miracles in your life are not waiting for you to earn them.
They are already in progress.
I wish I had told you sooner.
All my love,
Nikki
Conversations With My Rabbi: Timeless Teachings for a Fractured World, by Nikki Goldstein and Rabbi Eli Schlanger, is published by HarperCollins on May 26, 2026.