The Young and The Restless | Blast from the 25-year past

Residents had filled envelopes with letters and photographs, tapes and newspaper clippings.

They contained information that would become history and stir memories two and a half decades into the future.

That future is now.

The gamble with any project like this, I guess, is that no-one really knows what the future holds; how our technology and our means of communication will change.

On one hand, people who scribbled their landline phone numbers on their capsule entries to be contacted via when it was unearthed probably no longer have those landlines.

Fewer people probably owned mobile phones in 2000 than those who did.

On the other hand, Facebook didn’t exist then but is now a fantastic grapevine for finding and reconnecting people.

At various moments throughout the years I remembered I’d placed a letter in my family’s envelope but had quickly forgotten again.

I was 20 when I wrote it, little more than a kid, really.

When I became aware a few weeks’ back that 2025 was the year of the disentombment of our ‘diaries’, my eagerness to retrieve the preserved pages and pictures was teetering on impatience.

As I drove to Mum and Dad’s to pick it up after my former Rotarian father’s close contact had hand-delivered the family envelope to him, I was hit with an unexpected pang of nervousness.

I felt some kind of need to brace for impact.

Why? I’m not entirely sure.

Perhaps I knew there’d be mention of people and pets that are no longer with us and that the memories could be a trigger for sadness.

I wondered how alien it might feel reading words from my 20-year-old self.

Was I the same person after living what feels like another couple of lifetimes since then?

I’ve loved and lost, I’ve travelled, I became a mum and raised three children to teenagers on my own for the most part of their lives.

Would I even recognise the author of my former existence?

Of course, I was being dramatic. Classic Bree.

I did cry about the losses and giggle at some of the words that were so obviously written as though I knew there was a possibility I could be dead by the time the capsule was dug up and had to make sure my parents knew I loved them ‘more than words could say’.

Thank goodness I was past my rebellious teen years or the message might have been different.

I also cringed at my naivety of naming the ‘boyfriend’ I was at the time ‘on a break from’ as my ‘soul mate’ and ‘the love of my life’.

I did marry that man briefly, but things went awfully awry a couple of years later.

His behaviour was definitely not the work of one’s ‘soul mate’.

My mum penned a letter, too.

She described my brother, sister and myself — outlining our ages, what cars we drove, what things we were into, how much she loved us all.

She had the nous at her age then, which is poetically my age now, to list current prices of common items, with the first one on the list being The News (five years before her youngest child — me — started working there for my first stint).

She listed a copy as being $1.

Petrol was .79c/litre, a carton (two litres) of milk was $1.75, a loaf of bread $1.80.

GST was a few months from being applied and the Olympics were on their way to Sydney.

Mum and Dad also had an 8mm video tape in among their goodies.

I was mostly the narrator of it and the one filming.

My 14-year-old constantly tells me I’m “such a TikTok mum” and not because I’m on TikTok regularly (I’m not), but because I “have to film everything” or “take photos of everything”.

I’ve tried to tell him I’ve always documented life; through video, images, journals and poetry before social media was even a thing.

That’s not a world he’s familiar with.

I continue to document life in the same way, but now also through social media posts and newspaper columns.

It turns out some things never change; I’ve spent a lifetime recording memories.

Other things that remain unchanged include many of my friends, my love of music and my ability to spell and punctuate correctly, as evidenced in my letter.

Sadly, the same is not true for my once lovely handwriting, which is now somewhat terrible as Heberden’s nodes (a form of osteoarthritis) have twisted my fingers over time.

Besides my illegible scrawl, other things that have changed include my taste in cars, some of my friends and perhaps my ability to see red flags in romantic partners.

I, now, at 45, will do what my mum did at the same age and grab an envelope from Rotary for the next burial.

I’ll invite my kids to make submissions and pen them all love letters that remind them of who they are today and what they’re into.

But I’ll be going old-school and printing a bunch of photos, just in case no-one has a USB input handy to view the pictures on my stick 25 years from now.

Who knows how different the world will look in another quarter of a century.