I am excited for today’s journaling prompt.
This is one of my favorite exercises. Maybe you’ve heard of this before, maybe you haven’t.
I want you to write a letter to your Super Hero self. You can choose, are you writing to all of your personas as one, are you writing to one specifically?
Personally, at this point, I am a fan of viewing them all as different perspectives of the same one Man or Woman. But how you view these exercises is entirely up to you.
Whatever you choose, I want you to write a letter to your Super Hero self. The focal point of the letter will be as follows:
Once all is said and done, once you have accomplished your mission here on Earth, what did you do during your time here that allowed you to leave successfully?
This is the equivalent of writing yourself a letter at the beginning of the school year, to yourself at the end of the year, outlining everything you did to earn an A.
Have you done this exercise before?
If you have, amazing! This is one of my favorite things to do.
If you haven’t, let me break the concept down for you a little bit more.
Let’s say you are about to embark on a 3 month adventure. You’re going to travel to Alaska and study grizzly bears, and you’re kind of nervous of being eaten alive. One of the ways that you manage your anxiety is by writing a letter to yourself 3 months in the future. You describe all the ways that you are proud of your future self for staying alive. You declare all the ways that you faced your fears, overcame self-doubt, and returned home safely at the end of your adventure. It could look something like this:
“Dear me (or you can use your name),
I am so proud of you! You just survived 3 months in Alaska! Holy cow! Was it cold there? Were you afraid? I know it wasn’t a long time to be away but there were so many things that could have killed you! Frostbite, animals, starvation, and more. I hope you didn’t even come close to death at all.
I am so impressed by how you handled every scary moment with courage. You never let fear overcome you. I am so glad you never came face to face with an actual grizzly bear. Otherwise, you wouldn’t be here to read this note.”
And then you can continue describing all the other scenarios you imagine you might face in Alaska, as well as all the ways you could potentially be proud of yourself for handling them.
I want you to use that same template to write your Super Hero self a congratulatory “You aced it! You did it! Woohoo! You won! You beat the bad guys and got to return home a Super Hero in your own right!” kind of letter. This letter can be short, it can be long. But it has to contain at least one extremely specific example of what you did as a Super Hero on Earth that allowed you to return home better than you left it. Wherever Home may be.
Even if Home for your Super Hero self is NYC, and you were fighting crime in Michigan. What made you a Super Hero in Michigan that you hadn’t done before you left NYC?
I won’t overwhelm you with any more examples for now. I trust that you can figure this one out. We will continue with another exercise tomorrow.
Have fun! And congratulations on acing your assignment already!
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