You’re a Time Traveler And You Matter Illustrated with Stupid-Looking Drawings

You’re a time traveler on a mission to travel to your past to be sure that today, you matter. As far as you know, you alone have this crazy-awesome power to change whatever you want in your past and future. You have the ability to go back in time to moments that made you feel like you don’t matter. You get to make yourself matter through what other people told you, way back then.

The time in grade school when you were at Skate City with your cousin and some girl you’d never seen before rolled up and said “You’re ugly.” You said nothing. Just stood there and watched her roll away.

Later, your Grandma said the girl was unkind and maybe even jealous of you. “That’s impossible – Grandma is wrong” you think because you’ve wondered recently if you are ugly. The girl was probably right. 

Your self-doubt probably didn’t start at Skate City. Probably, there are a lot of other moments that proved your unworthiness to you. Maybe there was a time before you remember anything at all, when somebody told you you don’t matter without saying a word.

Usually, nobody actually says you don’t matter. They tell you in other ways. Maybe somebody said you don’t matter while you were in a crib as they walked away.

When you were too young to say anything, or know what feelings are.

Learning you don’t matter doesn’t even have to be that big. Sometimes, it’s the girl at Skate City who tells you you’re ugly. You don’t know what’s worse, because nobody knows what’s worse when it comes to not feeling like mattering from before you knew what mattering meant.

BUT.

You’re a Time Traveler.

Because you’re a time traveler, you go back in time to Skate City. “I’ll at least fix this,” you decide because fixing what happened when you were a baby is too complicated and unknown. You remember Skate City though, so it feels fixable given your amazing ability to travel through time, and back to that minute.

Your whole life will be better because in this corrected version of your life, you never decided it’s true that you’re ugly.

You travel back, Bill and Ted style.

Anyway, you travel to 1983 and in this version of time, you say something clever to the girl who told you you’re ugly. Like, you know, the *best comeback ever* while the strobe lights twirl overhead. 

In your improved version of time, she’ll see that you are, in fact, quite witty and friend-worthy, and tell you she was kidding just to see what would happen. She wanted you to feel bad because she actually thinks you’re pretty.

This tidbit of knowledge will improve your self-esteem for the rest of your life. Grandma was right. 

But.

You think more about time travel, and the time you were abducted by aliens, and how changing your past, even when it’s for a really great cause like life-long better self-worth, that if you’d have changed that one thing, maybe you wouldn’t be who you are.

Given your low self-esteem, that’s probably not totally terrible except that today, you appreciate lessons like a girl telling you you’re ugly.

You wonder if it’s at least partly because of her that you are an encourager.

Maybe it’s better to remember the stranger who told you you’re ugly.

You decide to change your time travel destination to the past to a different moment that’s not so formative. Like, maybe when you’re less of an impressionable young child.

Remembering the relationship that makes you wonder even today whether saying “Yes” sabotaged your plans (and therefore the life you knew you should’ve been living), you travel back in time to say “No” to him.

You get in your phone booth, and there you are. Sitting on a bench with him the exact day when you wish you’d said “No.”

He asks if you’re sure. Instead of “Yes,” you say “No.”

Boom. Life you *knew* you’d have that had been derailed all because of saying “Yes” to him is back on track. Time travel success!

But. Life is already derailed.

What if saying “Yes” to him and then living and breathing through times when you wished you’d said “No,” until the time you finally did say “No” were all leading to now?

And what if the time of now is the time when you finally realize you matter?

As a parent, you realize that there’s a difference between walking away from a crib and the moment when a 10-year-old has an idea. Maybe, it’s this very idea that shows him he matters. To you, and to the world, because one day, you’ll be gone.

And maybe, him mattering means that you matter too.

So, turns out time traveling to the past doesn’t really work. At least, probably.

Let’s visit the future!

To time travel successfully and to fix having mattered, you visit the future. Because of course visiting the future provides proof that you mattered, all these years.

You meet your grandchildren and tell them about their daddy when he was a young boy. YOU MATTER, because the future matters, and there are adorable, amazing new humans playing inside and outside who matter so much.

This is such a perfect plan. You already know what you’ll be wearing, because you’ve imagined traveling to the future before, specifically, to the year 2059.

You get back in the phone booth, Bill and Ted style, and tell it to take you to when you’re almost 91 years old. You’re excited because certainly traveling to the future can’t mess up today.

Except, on the way there, you realize something. What if you get there and you’re dead? Would time traveling to a day when you no longer exist be possible? What if the epidemic of COVID-19 back in 2020 took you out? Or changed something?

You decide time traveling sounds amazingly powerful and amazing, but is, ultimately, not something humans are able to do for a reason.

Maybe you’re not supposed to know. About any of it. But I promise right now, you ARE worthy.

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This has been a Finish the Sentence Friday post, with the prompt of “If I were a time traveler…”