Future You Does Not Exist

don't worry, future me doesn't exist either. :)

Lately, I have become aware of a strange gap between where my body is and where my mind has wandered off to.

Halfway through sex, I find myself mentally composing a shopping list for a friend's dinner that weekend. Sitting in a taxi crawling through Kampala traffic, I suddenly realise I have no memory of the journey. We have passed fruit vendors balancing pineapples on their heads, boda riders threading themselves through impossible gaps, schoolchildren dragging oversized backpacks through dust and exhaust fumes, and somehow I have been absent for all of it.

I arrive, but I do not remember arriving.

At first, I assumed this was simply adulthood. Everyone is tired. Everyone is busy. Everyone is trying to hold together a life that often feels larger than the number of hours available to live it. Yet the feeling has lingered long enough that I have started to suspect it is pointing toward something deeper.

What if the problem is not that life is moving too quickly? What if I have become too practised at moving through it faster than advisable?

For most of my adult life, I have lived according to a roadmap that felt so obvious I rarely questioned it. Get the degree. Build the career. Become dependable. Show up for people. Keep learning. Keep improving. Keep moving. Keep striving.

None of these goals were imposed upon me. Many were things I genuinely wanted. Yet somewhere along the way, they stopped feeling like choices and started feeling like gravity.

Sometimes I think of adulthood as inheriting a house from a relative I never met. (Which in this economy is welcome.) One day you wake up and discover you own it. The roof leaks in places. The plumbing groans in the middle of the night. The neighbours seem to know one another better than you know yourself. Yet instead of asking whether you even want to live there, you become obsessed with decorating.

You paint the walls.

You buy new furniture. You rearrange the furniture.

You buy cushions.

You hang photographs.

You tell yourself that once everything looks right, the uneasiness will disappear. But it never does, even when that Turkish purchased carpet that clothes the floor feels softer than a hug of love.

Lately, I have begun to suspect that much of my exhaustion comes from maintaining a life rather than inhabiting one. The distinction sounds small until you feel it. Have you felt it?

Maintaining a life means answering emails while eating lunch. It means listening to voice notes while washing dishes. It means mentally composing tomorrow's to-do list during conversations that deserve your full attention. It means reaching the end of a week feeling productive but unable to remember anything that actually happened inside it. It means ignoring your intuition when it asks you to reach out to a friend when the urge comes.

A few months ago, I found myself reading about Ernest Becker late at night. His argument was simple enough to fit inside a sentence: human beings spend remarkable amounts of energy avoiding the fact that they are going to die.

I remember closing the book and staring at the bottom of the top of my bunk bed.. Not because the idea was new. Not because I stare at the top bunk’s bottom when I need air.

Because it wasn't new. But it did need thought.

The unsettling part was recognising how often I behaved as though time were unlimited. It was not something I used to do. I lived each day like I was dying. But after I turned 30. I got a job. I got out of a long term relationship. I kept postponing things.

Not dramatically like everything I do. But in ordinary ways.

I would travel when work became less demanding.

I would write more when life became more stable.

I would rest once everything was under control.

I would put myself out there when I was less plus size.

I would allow love to find me when I was less unhealed.

I would become the person I wanted to be somewhere in the future.

The future, in my imagination, had become populated by a version of me who was calmer, wiser, more disciplined, more organised and somehow less confused than the person currently occupying my body.

Future me handled difficult conversations gracefully.

She exercised consistently.

She always replied to messages on time.

She had figured things out.

The problem is that she does not exist.

She never existed. She actually may never exist.

She is a character I created to avoid accepting responsibility for the life unfolding right now. Once I realised that, other things started to make sense. Why years seem to pass faster than they used to. Why school holidays felt endless when I was young while entire adult years now disappear with alarming speed.

A neuroscientist once suggested that the brain remembers novelty. Children encounter the world for the first time. Adults encounter variations of Tuesday.

Whether or not the theory is entirely correct, it feels true enough. The days blur because they resemble one another. The years blur because we stop paying attention.

We wake up one morning and realise we have spent months preparing for a life that has already begun.

Among the women I know, there is a particular kind of fatigue that surfaces in quiet conversations. Not burnout exactly. More like disappointment.

Not disappointment in our lives.

Disappointment in the idea that fulfilment would arrive automatically once we became competent enough.

Instead, competence has a way of attracting responsibility. The more capable you become, the more people rely on you. The more reliable you prove yourself to be, the more things require your attention.

You wake up one day and realise you have become excellent at carrying things.

What nobody tells you is that carrying and living are not necessarily the same activity.

These days, I find myself returning to a simpler question.

What would happen if I stopped waiting?

Not for a promotion or a relationship or a publishing opportunity.

What would happen if I stopped waiting for a future version of myself to grant permission for the life I already have?

Because future me is not coming.

The house will never be completely clean.

The inbox will refill.

The dishes will return.

The responsibilities will multiply.

Life will remain gloriously unfinished.

Perhaps the feeling that something is off is not a sign that we are failing. Perhaps it is the small part of ourselves that remains awake, refusing to let us sleepwalk through our own existence.

For years I treated that feeling as background noise.

Now I am trying to listen, because I am increasingly aware that the person I keep waiting for is not on her way.

There is only me.

Sitting in a taxi.

Staring out of the window.

Smiling at eyes at that catch mine.

Trying, for once, to remember the journey. Because I am here, right now. In this place and that might be all the time I have left.

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Fun fact?

I released my poetry chapbook Perfectly Imperfect Portraits in May 2026. It's 27 poems that I adore. I think I'm a marvellous poet and I'm so proud to have invested in myself. I hope to do more readings and share some of the videos and pictures.