The Letter to the Guardian
The point is to get a stuck decision moving by writing both halves of a conversation with yourself, addressing the half you do not usually let speak.
This one asks for a door that shuts. If you do not have a room to yourself, a parked car, a library, or a bus at the wrong hour will do.
You need two sheets of paper, a pen, somewhere to write, and forty minutes. The next morning you need ten more.
Pick the name you will write to. You are writing to the part of you that has kept track of your direction while you were busy with other things, and not to the self you present to other people.
Sit down. Put your phone in another room. If you write on a device, that is the one that stays: put it in airplane mode and close everything else on it first.
On the first sheet write today's date and Dear Guardian.
Write what is actually happening in your life right now. Cover the money, the work, the people, your body, and the thing you have not told anyone. Write it the way you would write to a friend who loves you, will not flinch, and will tell you when you are lying. Twenty minutes. Do not reread, do not correct, do not make it sound good.
At the bottom write one question. It has to be about something you can do. Good: Do I hand in my notice in March or stay another year? What am I doing about the drinking? Bad: Will she come back? Is this the right path? Those are about other people or about the future and you will get nothing usable back.
Read your question out loud.
Take the second sheet. Write Dear and your own name. Answer the question. Write fast, do not reread, keep the pen moving for ten minutes by the clock. If you run out, write I have nothing over and over until words come.
Put both sheets in a drawer. Go to bed.
The next morning, after you have eaten, read both sheets through once.
Underline every sentence in the reply that names something you could do in the next seven days. Copy those onto a third sheet and put it where you will see it daily — the fridge, your wallet, taped inside a drawer.
Keep the first two sheets or destroy them. If they hold anything you or anyone else might need later — a date, an account of something that happened, a name — keep them somewhere you would not mind them being found.
You will know whether this worked by whether the thing on the third sheet gets done, and you will know that without writing it down.