970x125
It started young for me. I didn’t really have anyone to talk with. My father was a sulky, silent brute and I couldn’t risk getting yelled at or hit by speaking up. My mother preferred not to hear about turmoil and always told me to think happy thoughts, even as my older sister urged me to image the worst so that whatever did happen to me wouldn’t be as bad as I imagined.
So of course, in my teens, I turned to my friends, and when it got too sad or too personal, I turned to my writing and to what I called my guardian angel. Oh, Guardian angel, I’d write, please let him call me/notice me/love me. Please Guardian Angel, let me be pretty, let kids not make fun of me or want to beat me up.
It always made me feel better, even if the boy I had my heart set on didn’t come around, or I still wasn’t pretty. It felt as if I had been heard and valued.
As an adult, I didn’t write to angels. I wrote to my across-the-country best friend Jo, because although we had not really known each other while at Brandeis together, she had impulsively written me a letter during a dark time because she was certain I somehow would understand. And I did. those letters created a friendship so intimate and close, we might have lived next door to each other. And when I was involved in a toxic relationship with a man who insisted on following me around to make sure I wouldn’t eat (I was 95 pounds) and I wrote her to be careful what she wrote me because he reads all my letters, it was Jo who yelled at me on the page and told me she would never be careful with me, because being careful was not the purpose of either our relationship or our letters.
I left that guy the next week.
Years later, when a man I adored died in my arms, I couldn’t handle my tsunami of grief. I told no one, not even my grief counselor, but I wrote letters to him pleading with him for answers. Why did he die and what would I do? How could I be in the world without him? What did it all mean? I didn’t get any real answers, no out-of-this-realm signs, but what I did get was a sense of release. What I didn’t expect was the feeling of connection, the sense that whatever our bond, it wasn’t broken. And that gave me peace when everything else left me bereft.
Love has always been the basis of my letter writing, even when that love was returned with hatred. When my beloved older sister began attacking me, her vitriol palpable because she said my life reminded her of the life she was meant to have and didn’t, and I lived that way to hurt her, I tried to talk to her. I offered family therapy. It made me crazy with grief that yet another bond that had meant something to me was broken. But then I began to write letters to her. Even though she was most certainly alive, I knew I’d never hear from her. I knew, too, that if I mailed them, they’d come back to me in pieces. But I also knew that I had to write out my hurt, my thwarted love, my abandonment. I wrote essays in a fever. I published them without her name in there (her last name is different from mine), and to my surprise, I began to be inundated with comments and letters, all from people who had also been estranged, who were also floundering. Me, too, they said. I know just how you feel. Writing those essays didn’t dissolve the estrangement, but it made me feel less alone. It made me feel heard, as if I mattered.
I began to realize that writing letters could free me of shame or anger and that they were a kind of cleansing. I could write a letter to a cruel, antisemitic high school classmate of mine, and never send it, because I had written my way out of the need to be heard or seen by her. It was a way of saying I Am, I Am.
Lastly, and more importantly, I’ve used letters for joy. On my computer are two important files, one for my husband and one for my son. They’re meant to be opened only after my death. They’re meant to feel real, intimate, as if I am there, telling each of them what they mean to me, how much I love them. I want to make sure my son knows all his childhood stories, and mine, too. Every year, I refresh each letter.
Writing letters saved me throughout my life. Maybe it will save you during yours—or even after after.
