In Defense of Writing Letters to Friends and Family

Originally written April 2012 • Uploaded to Facebook on Apr 24, 2012, 10:28 AM

Recently, I received a cold letter from someone requesting that I stop writing letters altogether. This person explicitly asked that I cease my correspondence and suggested that, instead, I should seek psychological counseling. They had intercepted and read a letter I sent to someone else—in essence, invading the recipient's privacy to read just one or two letters out of what has been many years of consistent correspondence. Because of what I wrote, this individual decided I was being manipulative. They took issue with the very fabric of who I am: my hopes, my fears, and my adventures. If the content of a personal letter displeases you, then by all means, burn it. Or read it as fiction and forget about it. But why demand that I stop writing entirely?

I have been in a constant "moving state" for the past six years, changing homes, friends, and environments about as often as one replaces a toothbrush. Sometimes even I forget exactly where I am, so can you imagine what your friends and family back home must think? The lack of routine communication, whether intentional or accidental, creates an inevitable gap in people's memories of you. It is within this precise gap that written letters help, forming a deliberate bridge between those who are close to us and those who are far away. Writing letters is a profound way to keep people informed about what you are up to, what you are feeling, and what your future plans look like. It is also a beautiful venue to express love, gratitude, or nostalgia for times that have slipped by—and when you travel, getting nostalgic is entirely inevitable.

Traveling and living in foreign countries is fantastic, I must admit, but it can also be terribly lonely. Sometimes you find good company that lasts, but when you constantly live with one foot in the door and one foot out, keeping that company close is daunting. It is in those solitary stretches that you begin to hold your memories, especially the good ones, closest to your chest. For me, some of the sweetest memories are of the unconditional love given to me by my friends and family. By writing a letter, you remind yourself of those anchoring moments and relive them, proving to yourself that life has been good and that you are still loved.

Furthermore, when you live halfway across the world, making a standard phone call can be a frustrating chore due to lousy local connections and exorbitant costs. One would think free digital services like Skype would make this seamless, but almost every call I have ever attempted features an agonizing four-second delay that makes natural conversation nearly impossible. Navigating a strict twelve-hour time difference complicates things further; your day is my night, and my night is your day. Sometimes, the internal anxiety of calling someone you haven't spoken to in months becomes overwhelming, requiring a massive amount of courage just to lift the receiver. Writing a letter often comes much easier. Lifting a pen will always feel lighter than lifting the phone.

In this day and age, most people choose to write emails—mindless electronic notes dashed off in haste, containing a few brief words saying *I love you* or *I don't love you anymore*. Actually taking the time to compose a handwritten letter is infinitely more complex. First, it requires manual labor. Spitting out a 10,000-word essay on a computer keyboard might take a couple of hours, but doing the same by hand takes days. Then, you have to physically locate and purchase an envelope. Finally, you have to buy international postage, a task that always requires standing in long, slow-moving post office lines. And there is always a catch: mail occasionally gets swallowed by global transit, meaning if an important letter goes missing, you have to sit down and repeat the entire physical process from scratch.

When you add up all those deliberate steps and preoccupations, you realize that writing a letter requires true, measurable effort. But why would someone go to such extremes? Because you can say absolutely anything on paper, entirely to your heart's content. You can choose to lay bare the truth, you can choose to tell intricate lies, or you can choose to paint whatever reality you prefer. As for my letters, they are my method of telling people the unvarnished truths about my life, whether they happen to be interested or not. Much like a reader chooses to scan the sports section while skipping the business pages of a newspaper, a person opening a letter from me can choose to bypass the sad parts and focus strictly on the good. But I write all kinds of things, because my life has never been one unbroken streak of happiness. I have enjoyed many laughs, many loves, and many beautiful eras. But I have also endured bitter times, harsh environments, and profound unhappiness. We all do. It simply depends on how comfortable we are talking about our failures or our successes. Letters allow us to write openly about our dreams, sharing our lives across oceans.

What saddened me most about the hateful note asking me to stop writing was the sender's assumption that I was being manipulative—that I was falsely trying to rekindle a relationship that had drifted into embers simply because I left to explore the world six years ago. The writer felt I was trying to extract affection that wasn't mine to claim, arguing that I shouldn't seek deep bonds where there was no direct blood relation. To me, blood makes no difference. It is when we share our personal stories that we truly connect as human beings. Even if our stories aren't the happiest or the funniest, we can all welcome the comforting knowledge that someone out there is thinking of us, that someone took the time to write, and that we are held in someone's heart. If I write you a letter, it means you are on my mind, and I am actively trying to send my love from a long way off. If I needed money, I wouldn't write a relative; I would write a bank. Duh, I'm not that stupid.

Dear reader, just as you choose whether or not to purchase a newspaper, you have the total freedom to open a letter or toss it directly into the fireplace. Even if I don't maintain a permanent physical address where someone can mail a response back to me, an empty silence is infinitely preferable to receiving hate mail from a third-party interloper seeking to snap a link I have spent years trying to maintain. Sending letters out into the void is always a gamble. You risk the physical loss of the paper, and you risk the cynical assumption that you want something in return. I expect absolutely nothing from the people I write to. I gladly rejoice when I get a simple acknowledgment that a page arrived safely, and I celebrate twice over if I am lucky enough to receive a handwritten reply.

Ultimately, true communication is a messy, difficult endeavor. For me, attempting to summarize what I am up to, what I am dreaming of, or what I am grieving over during a rushed ten-minute phone call is completely impossible. It is on paper, through the permanent weight of written words, that I find the perfect space to express myself and catalog the news of my life. If these updates are sometimes joyful and sometimes heavy, they remain my happiness and my sadness. It is entirely up to you whether you choose to share them with me.