Belonging Practice 3: Letter Writing
Slow mail and child-like joy in an age of adult urgency
Dear City Person,
Firstly, I pray that those of you living in the GCC have stayed safe in the midst of the flooding that has impacted Oman, UAE, Bahrain, and Saudi Arabia. I reassure you all that me and my family are safe and we had minor issues at the house that we were able to quickly resolve. I hope to write more about the reflections this brought up for me in a future post. In the meantime, here is the topic I had scheduled for today as promised previously.
Today’s post is part of a series about activities that have helped me feel more connected to people or places. I also invite readers to share their experiences or to experiment with these practices if they have not already. Today I will focus on how writing physical letters has impacted my sense of belonging.
Some house keeping before I dive in…
If you are new to my free weekly newsletter, Belonging Co-Lab, check out the About page linked here if you haven’t already and click here to see my previous posts. If you are viewing this from the Substack app and have not already subscribed, you may do so by clicking on the button below:
One of the things that I have never outgrown from my childhood years is my fascination with stationary and the written word. This was in part influenced by my Mom (or “Yuma” as we call her in our Gulf Arabic dialect). Yuma once showed me letters she had received from friends and family during her university years abroad in the UK. She also gifted me a pink box of small blank pink sheets of paper with matching envelopes and pen that she herself used to use to write some of her letters.
This left an impression on me and I wrote my first physical letter when I went to London for surgery when I was around 8 years old. But I never seriously started writing physical letters until much later in my university years abroad in Boston and the practice helped me navigate my reverse culture shock in my first couple years back in Dubai.
A few questions I have for readers before I continue…
When was the first time you have written a physical letter? What was that like for you?
How were you introduced to slow mail?
What is something you have never outgrown from your childhood?
I used to sporadically blog in my university years that had me make a few online friends (the blog is currently deactivated and lacked the focus of my current newsletter). One of these online friends, who was based in California, re-introduced me to the joy of slow mail and expanded its creative possibilities for me. While I have unfortunately lost touch with her in my move back, I am still connected with her positive impact.
When we started exchanging letters, I was initially intimidated by her stunning penmanship compared to my handwriting which has been described as “chicken scratch” by some. But seeing how she embraced the spirit of what I shared regardless of its visual appearance and enjoying the anticipation of what will I find next in my mailbox encouraged me to continue.
In this process, I found alternative ways of visually expressing myself in my letters outside of penmanship. My pen pal tended to seal her envelopes with decorative stickers so this inspired me to do the same and to also use washi tape. I loved how this slowed me down and had me reconnect to my inner child that used to collect and exchange stickers.
As I got introduced to collage art through a free workshop I had taken in my mid-20s at the Cambridge Women’s Center in Cambridge, Massachusetts, USA, I gradually started to incorporate collage into my letters. Initially I only used washi tape and cut-out pieces of magazine pages but then discovering how I can use distress ink pads to paint backgrounds without knowing how to properly paint myself was a game changer (I don’t earn affiliate fees from this link). How I got introduced to distress ink pads is a topic for another future post about the hidden world of “letterboxing” that I am engaged in, so stay tuned!
I experimented with tapping the ink pads on blank sheets of paper or cards then swiping them in lines or swirls at different pressure levels. I loved the lack of predictability in how the textures and patterns of darker and lighter patches would turn out in the end. I loved the child-like freedom of just playfully creating without needing to overthink every detail and to invite someone else into this world through mail.
When I moved back to Dubai in 2018, I would pick up freshly fallen flowers and leaves and feathers in my walks and started to incorporate them in my collages and letters. This helped with my reverse culture shock as it helped me slow down and notice the details of plants that are commonly cultivated in our streets and gardens and the birds that greet our mornings and evenings. I would thus connect with the city in a different way than I am used to. Incorporating these parts of urban nature into my letters would be a way of inviting the person I am addressing to join me where I am.
Even if I did not always decorate my letters, just the act of physically writing to a person felt different than doing so over email or WhatsApp or other social media platforms. I tend to feel a sense of “urgency” in digital media perhaps because of how convenient these modes of communication are and how I often associate them with “work.”
Writing by hand entails slowing down enough to make sure that my writing is legible has me better embody the presence of the person I am writing to even if they are not physically with me. I also find that looking at a person’s handwriting gives me a glimpse into a side of them that I don’t get to experience over typed mediums, almost like witnessing their “visual voice.”
Even if someone were to mail me a typed letter, it would still feel more special to me than if it were sent digitally as I have found in a letter a cousin of mine sent me in the 90s when she used to live in North Carolina for 2 years. The slowness of sending and waiting for a reply by itself created a shared intimate silence in which both sides can digest what was sent and received versus needing to rush to “perform” a response. This feels different to me from the pauses in between digital interactions where we know that we can immediately read and respond.
In times when I feared that I have become emotionally disconnected from someone because of moving countries, letter writing would remind me that their impact on my life is much closer to me than I realize.
Here are my last questions for readers:
What were your impressions about slow mail before reading this post? Did they change or remain the same?
If you already write letters, what differences, if any, do you notice between it and communicating via digital media or phone calls?
Next week’s newsletter will list non-profits around the world that are looking for volunteer pen-pals to help with the isolation that the people they serve experience.
If you know of any similar ones that you would like me to feature, please either reply to this email or comment on Substack by clicking on the button below:
Before I wrap up…
I am ending each of my posts with a randomly drawn conversational card that you can consider using to deepen your conversations with people this week. So here’s today’s card drawn from a deck called Scenario Cards:
“What if you could not make your own decisions, but you had to choose someone else to make them for you? Who would you choose?”
Let me know if you end up using this question in any of your conversations and how it goes!
Click the link here to learn more about Scenario Cards. I currently earn an affiliate fee for every purchase from this link. This is so far the first affiliate partnership I have and I only plan to do so with products I genuinely benefited from. I had previously written a post about conversational cards in general prior to being invited to Scenario Cards’ affiliate program. Click here for the link to the post.
The art work is beautiful and is one type of notes I love to send. I am in love with snail mail. Especially writing my grandchildren, who even live locally. I have envelopes of all the letters and cards my husband has sent me over the years, including the ones from our penpal days. He was in the US Marine corps with my brother and that's how it started. I have envelopes of all the correspondence from young men in our program who write while incarcerated in the adult system. I love digital communication, but I love to write a card or note. I often think of the move "The Postman" an apocalyptic look at communication and the power of the letter, lost then found.
Your posts always get me thinking Reema. I have never been much of a letter writer for whatever reason - maybe the obligation of writing thank you letters in childhood!? Mm. (Back then I would rather say it than write it!). I do love cards though, and have lots that I have kept along with other random keepsakes in some very disorganised shoeboxes! I also love digital communication. I enjoyed hearing about the joy letter writing brings you, and really appreciate the beautiful little details of the crafting. xx