When I was a junior in college I was paired with a pen pal who was going to school in Minnesota. We've been writing letters back and forth ever since (4 years and a collective 6 changes of address now) and it's proved to be a really amazing way to get to know someone else my age.
I've used the internet for the majority of my life and developed many of my relationships, or at least got to know people mainly through Myspace, Facebook, AIM back in the day and texting. In order to build our relationship through the mail we had to establish boundaries and guidelines for how we'd interact with each other. It's one thing to ping back and forth thousands of times in the beginnings of a new friendship or relationship without much regard for offending or having to back-track because within seconds of sending a message another containing "JK" or "So sorry!" or whatever can be sent, reversing what has been done.
With letters, if you offend someone you're kind of doomed. If you say something or mention something in your life that your pen pal doesn't agree with you might end that relationship for good. Whenever there was a longer than average gap in our correspondence I always wondered if I had said something that annoyed or weirded out my pen pal. But each time she responded with "oh my gosh that happened to me!" or "no worries!" and I liked her more and more. Now nothing is off limits in our lives. We're both highly open people and our lives have intertwined so much over the last 4 years it's been amazing.
Our pen palship has encouraged me to reach out in this way to many of my friends, friends from college, friends from home, my grandparents, etc. It's a fun way to communicate with people instead of simply "liking" their posts on Facebook or texting them once in a while.
Now that I'm trying to launch some sort of side-business as a calligrapher it made sense to try and gain some more practice with one of the most common tasks of a calligrapher — addresses. A few weeks ago I sent over 20 letters, some of them pictured below, to all manner of people to gain some new skills and also send some love to people I care about. It was great, although tiring, and it felt good to send so much mail at once.
Here's to more mail, and supporting the USPS!
♢♢♢