If you haven't already noticed, two of my greatest loves in life are my friends and anything made of paper, so for me friendship by letter is a match made in heaven. Every time I get home and see an envelope from my friend on the doormat, my heart jumps. The handwriting is as familiar as tone of voice and picking up the letter feels like reaching an outstretched hand. I'm suddenly the main character in an old-fashioned film. Hello friend, can't wait to hear what you've been up to!
I sit down with a cup of tea and make reading each letter into a little event. I love reading how my friend how has been spending her days and how life has been for her. I love writing back-- it's like a conversation but looser. share books we've read, places we've been, life as a teacher, observations about phases of life or simply the changes of the seasons and how these makes us feel.
This is purely a friendship on paper. No Whatsapp, no social media, no coffee dates or going out together: the paper is where we meet. These meetings have their own rhythm with pauses in that are rich, not stagnant. It's a slow-burning friendship with a real warmth and depth, built on shared interests and mutual feelings.
Like all good friends, she makes me feel that warm and cosy feeling which (to me) is characteristic of friendship. More than warmth though, she makes me feel like I've got nothing to hide which I suppose is the quality of acceptance really. In other words, I can be myself not some curated, pre-prepared version of myself that is fearful of other people's perceptions of me.
I've written about this before, but being around people where I can be 'myself' helps me live my life in the fullest and most meaningful way possible. She is an emotionally generous friend with a lot to share. As we come closer to the end of 2024, I notice that one of the themes of my year has been friendship, and I plan to write more on this before the year is over.
I've always been a letter writer, ever since I could write. People, like my granny, wrote to me from when I was very young, so I saw this as something normal and thought it was something all families did. My first concrete memory of writing to someone was on a school trip to a museum. The teacher asked all the children to write a postcard to someone about our day and I remember how she was shocked when I knew the address of my auntie who was living in a completely different city. It was natural to me that I would know the address (and the postcode!), so didn't understand why she was surprised.
Just as I love how diaries, journals or scrapbooks capture a feeling or an observation from a moment in time, a letter (or postcard) has that tendency too. With a letter, these are feelings or observations that are shared. The last letter my granny ever wrote to me describes the birds in her garden. It's these little moments that are felt and observed that add up to become a life. She derived joy in the little things and there's a lesson in that for me, the overthinker and the worrier. The enormousness of my grief finds its comfort in small things, everyday things. A fox crossing the road in front of me eyes-glinting. Dark leaves wet on the pavement like an earthly constellation. Potato peelings that make my hands feel floury.
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As someone who feels a goodbye like a rupture and a separation like a gulf, I take comfort in paper-based objects. I keep hold of all my journals, scrapbooks and letters: these are the first objects I would want to save in a fire. I like the permanence of words on paper. I re-read words and let them sink into me. I often want spoken words to come back— to mentally revisit a conversation with a friend— but they have disappeared into thin air.
In a recent article written for Therapy Today (in which I was generously featured), journalist Ellie Broughton quotes DBT therapist Jaclyn Everitt, who describes responses in people with this diagnosis as 'survival adaptations' related to 'early developmental ruptures and trauma'. I live in constant fear of rupture— this word perfectly capturing the violence— of the people I love turning round to me and saying they hate my guts and never want to speak to me again.
I find it hard to conjure a sense of people I love emotionally in relation to myself. If someone is not present with me physically, I feel them as an emotional absence; it's like carrying people-shaped holes around inside of my heart. It's getting easier, the older I get and the more I learn to let go of fear and have trust. It's no coincidence that I cling to written words. They stick around when spoken ones have gone.
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One of the things I love most about a letter is, strangely enough, the envelope. When I send letters, nine times out of ten I decorate the envelope— I want it to make a statement: I'm here, I love you! I like the boundary an envelope provides. It says, confidentially: open me, but only if I'm intended for you (surely a hallmark of a 'bad egg' is someone who opens post not addressed to them!).
So why do people like me still turn to snail mail when there are myriad options for communication, many of which are quicker. I think it's several reasons. Firstly, the nostalgia of paper and pen which takes a person to places they might not feel compelled to go on WhatsApp (as much as I love WhatsApp too, as my friends in receipt of way too many messages know only too well...). Secondly, it's the slow pace of this communication in a world of constant, instant communication. A letter says take your time to read, and take your time to respond.
Finally, letter writing has a history of inviting intimacy into our lives that some people (like me) enjoy. This quotation from the American essayist Agnes Repplier, taken from her work Essays in Idleness (1893) expresses the natural desire to discuss our lives:
'[R]eal letter-writing—is founded on a need as old and as young as humanity itself, the need that one human being has of another. [...] The inextinguishable impulse to "pass on" experiences either of soul or body, to share with some one else that which we are hearing, or seeing, or feeling, or suffering, or enjoying,—these are the motives which make letter-writing essential and inevitable'.
This week I read Maria Popova's essay on The Marginalian 'The Wound Is the Gift: David Whyte on the Relationship Between Anxiety and Intimacy'. It articulated things I feel, but have never known how to express— namely, what she calls 'the central paradox' of intimacy. Popova quotes the poet and philosopher David Whyte on this paradox: 'To become intimate is to become vulnerable not only to what I want and desire in my life, but to the fear I have of my desire being met.' (Consolations II). Letters makes me feeling wierdly fulfilled, but also full of longing at the same time. Is it due to the strange combination of distance and presence?
I don't know, but one thing I do know is that letter writing doesn't feel old-fashioned to me, it makes me feel alive.
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How does letter writing make you feel? Is it a part of your life and if not, do you want to make it one and how could you make this happen? I would love to hear your thoughts.
-Rosie x
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