I love writing. It’s been my passion since I was a kid so it isn’t weird to find me writing one thing or another during the day. But writing a letter each day for two weeks—a total of 14 letters—somehow felt like one of the hardest writing assignments I’ve been ever given. Which is saying something given that I once wrote a 100-page book when I was 13…for fun.
I realized it was the fact that I would have to give these pieces of paper to someone eventually. They would read it, judge it, maybe even laugh at my face for it but it would be in someone else’s hands and out of mine. For some reason, I didn’t like that. It made me nervous and for one of the letters, I wrote three different drafts until I reluctantly decided to stop at the fourth.
But maybe, it was good. It is good. It’s true that my hands were a wreck of sweaty trembling when the time came to give all these letters away and my voice choked multiple times when I explained the whole situation, but at the end of the day it felt sorta good. A part of me was actually kind of relieved that I was able to share parts of me with people I really do care about.
Eventually there comes a point when you feel like exploding and it starts all over again. It’s a cycle that I realize these letters kind of helped to stop. I was finally able to express certain thoughts or questions I was always too afraid to say in person to all my friends and family members. Whether it got me answers or not, I at least knew it was out there in the world. It manifested into much more than just buried rocks in my brain that weighed me down.
I get why people say to write it down when you’re emotionally stressed in some form. It does help and sometimes even pretending like you’re writing this to that one someone helps too. Spoken words aren’t my greatest strength, far from it. But maybe, written ones are.
So do I recommend writing a letter each day to someone that matters to you? Maybe not exactly that. But writing a letter once every so often? Yeah. That might just work.