Beginning at about age thirteen I was a consistent writer of lengthy letters to people I missed. Part diary, part longing. If they wrote back (maybe half as often, if I was lucky) I would spread their letter out beside the next one I wrote, to make sure I addressed everything. I think of this writing now and I love how much I wanted to understand and be understood and I also think it must have been a little suffocating.
In my twenties, I kept a diary which cut down on the letter writing a little but not much. A fair bit of my diary from that time is about letters I've written for which I am awaiting responses, eagerly and sometimes angrily. Can you believe that I waited a minimum of a month for an answer, and can you imagine what that did to me if the month stretched to two months or more?
Conversely, the invention of email and the ability to immediately communicate to someone what was going on in my thoughts and my life cut back the diary quite a lot. Who was I writing that diary for? vs a letter and the potential interested audience, the possible provocation to interaction. Plus I had automatic copies of everything, so it was still a diary. But it made me a worse kind of crazy to write and wait for a response when it still took a month or months and whyyyyyy.
In my forties, I started blogging, and what I learned to do with this was disentangle myself from a response. Maybe someone who knew me would read it, or maybe not; maybe they'd write a response or maybe not. It was the purest writing I did, because it was not about feedback or publishing or a desk drawer. It was releasing a thought into the wild.
Then social media arrived, and writing became about the response in a way that was worse for a lot of people than letter writing had been for me. Having survived the anguish of an unanswered letter, I think I enjoyed social media without letting it get too close to my heart. It still sucks what it's turned into and I mourn the updates from a range of friends.
HOWEVER in December at the unmitigated prompting of one textual apothecarian, I finally started writing postcards and: wow. Here's what a postcard is: it is a brief format writing (like a social media post or a short letter) without the expectation of response. You get a stack of stamps and you stick them on a stack of cards and then when you're waiting somewhere for something, you write a postcard instead of looking at reels or whatever, and then you send it and forget it. You can do that with diary entries, too. But as opposed to a diary, the primary message of a postcard is: thinking of you. A response to a postcard is not required or even expected; the format plus slow mailing times means your message is necessarily brief and complete in itself.
I'm pretty good at seeing folks when I'm in their towns, but the world I have chosen is large and I'm always missing someone. This seems like a very mentally healthy way to address (literally) my longing, rather than amplifying it. Also a tiny act of rebellion against the powers that control other ways we connect.
I bought 100 postcards. Send me your address if you want one.
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