Letter writing allows me to be a better version of myself — not cleverer, but more honest. That’s the idea that circles in my mind every time I sit down and wonder why the old ways of communication still appeal to me more than the breathless immediacy of the digital world.

I’ve thought about finding new pen pals, but the idea of finding someone who can match my rhythm and meet me halfway in thought and care feels like a tall order. It’s not impossible, just unlikely. Frankly, I don’t need a new daily source of disappointment.

Still, letters are one of writing’s most essential, most intimate forms. They deserve more attention. I wish I turned to them more often. If more of us wrote letters instead of doomscrolling or half-watching whatever the algorithm throws at us, maybe we’d know ourselves better. Perhaps, we’d say things that never make it into everyday conversation. Could we even admit the truths that live just beneath the surface, waiting to be named? Overall, in any case, we’d probably end up better human beings just by engaging in the process.

There’s something about writing to one specific person that forces clarity. It strips away the performative layer. “Here, this is for you,” the letter says. In doing so, we sometimes reveal what we’ve been trying to tell ourselves. But professional writing, especially the kind designed to appease an audience or an editor or a trending keyword, has a way of flattening the soul. Chasing latent semantic indices clearly set me back when it comes to writing for human beings.

I spent too many years trying to write what I thought would get traction, what would land, and what would serve the almighty search-engine spider gods. In the process, I lost all sense of proper narrative flow. I’d just be blathering on ad infinitum about whatever new bit of cleverness just happens to find its way from my latest brainwaves to my fingertips. In trying to be some sort of topical expert or niche blogger, I forgot, somehow, how to write for my fellow person.

There are many topics that I simply don’t really address in conversation, yet they are always on my mind. I’m not sure if it’s embarrassment or some other inconvenient emotional roadblock. Perhaps through the more personal nature of writing letters I can be more freely expressive, but then I worry that like many past freewriting exercises of mine, they will sooner than later degenerate into mostly worthless rambling sessions.

I’m not built to be concise, which is a death knell in a content world that increasingly relies on hot takes and bullet-point essays to make profitable efforts. I write like I think, which is spiraling, recursive, philosophical, and generally strange. The world doesn’t always have room for that, but letters do. Letters allow for the unfiltered, the rambling, and the deeply considered. In letters, I can still live without apology.

Also, I’m often accused – and often accuse myself – of being too difficult for the general reading audience to understand. It’s not that I think people are stupid now. I think that it’s quite the opposite, given the amount of information we have access to now. The problem is that we’ve been trained to read shallow and fast. But I refuse to write that way. That’s not ego, though, but rather stubborn, deliberate care I take to make sure I’m saying what I need to say.

While I may never be the ideal 21st-century content machine I first sought out to be, it turns out that I’m an excellent 19th-century letter writer who just happens to be living in the wrong era. Fortunately, now that my livelihood no longer hinges on word counts or page views, I’m returning to the form that never failed me. I see these essays I write now as open letters to whomever happens to stumble across them, like messages in bottles I put out to sea.

Sure, writing in a more epistolary format may never make me a dime. But writing them makes me feel much more whole as a person. They let me speak without distortion, and they might even leave behind something worthwhile for whoever finds them later. To me, that sort of satisfaction is worth more than algorithm-mad capitalists ever paid me.

~ Amelia Desertsong