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Whenever I want to take my growth temperature, measuring what I’ve learned or how I’ve metamorphosized, I always reach for the cache of letters — and later emails — that I’ve saved since I was 19, each one chronicling every stage of my life as I’ve raged and wept and cheered and poured my heart out. Letters, for me, have been both my blueprint and record.
It all started at 19 when I was so painfully shy that it sometimes was difficult to have friends. (No late-night heart-to-heart talks in the dorm for me.) But I could always write my soul out on the page, and when I transferred out of one college my sophomore year, to my surprise, I got a letter from a woman I barely knew, Jo Fisher.
She poured out her loneliness to me. “I don’t know why, but I thought you could understand,” she wrote. And hearing that someone valued me, not only made me feel better about myself, it made me realize that I did know what she was talking about. I immediately wrote her back, and we soon became confidantes. “I want to be a novelist, but I keep getting brutal rejections for my writing,” I wrote her while crying. “You won’t forever,” she assured me.
I kept rereading that and rereading this until an opportunity to send a story to a young writers contest appeared, and Jo urged me on. That story won first prize and got me an agent! “Told you so,” Jo wrote to me. “You have to believe you’re a success,” she told me, “because I believe it.” Her believing it made me begin to believe it, too.
If my teen years were all about friendships, my 20s and 30s were about love. Having been so open on the page with Jo made it a little easier to be that way in face-to-face encounters of the romantic kind. Even so, I never was able to tell my first husband that I didn’t want to live in his desired location, Pittsburgh, or that I was lonely because he was never home. Instead, though, I told his sister Jana, and we began to bond and become best friends.
When my husband suddenly asked me for a divorce because he was in love with another woman, I moved to Manhattan, where I had always wanted to be. The letters I got from Jana saved my sanity. “This isn’t for always,” she wrote me. “And I will always be your friend. Come home and be with me.”
When the marital separation did turn into always — and a divorce — Jana’s letters helped me again, but not in the way she wanted. I never came back to my first husband or to Pittsburgh, because living in Manhattan made me stronger. I wrote her what I now knew to be true, “Manhattan is my home,” the place that would help me figure out who I really was.
Those years too, I got involved with a soft-spoken man who wanted me with him all the time, a change from my past, but also a dangerous one. This guy followed me to see if I ate candy (I weighed 105 and he thought I was too fat). He followed me when I went to see friends.
I wrote to Jo about what was going on, revealing every detail. One day, I came home, and this guy was reading a letter from Jo. “What are you doing?” I demanded, and he calmly said that what was mine was also his. That we were a couple. I’m ashamed to say that back then, my solution was to write to Jo and tell her not to write anything personal in the letters because my boyfriend was reading them.
Her response changed everything. “I will never not write my feelings to you!” she wrote angrily. “And you will never not tell me yours!” Something broke when I started to read that. I took the letter and ripped it up so he couldn’t read it. That day, I found my voice. And I used it. I broke up with this man, finding my fierceness, telling him why, the same way I had with Jo in the letters. And he listened to me as if my thoughts had weight. That episode changed me, making me realize my voice could alter my situation for the better.
It’s strange, but it wasn’t until my 40s and 50s that I finally began to have compassion for myself. I’ve been friends with successful writer Victoria Zackheim for 20 years, and even though she’s on a different coast, we’ve become closer than ever every single day through constant emails.
Victoria probed my history and when I finally told her about growing up with a brutal dad, and a mom and sister who disapproved of both my appearance and scolded me to stop trying for things that they themselves didn’t have, she wrote me, “You don’t have to be a failure to earn their love. And the more successful you are, the more I love you. And P.S. you are beautiful.” Guess who I chose to believe?
Now, in my post-50 years, all I have to do is read my emails, which I save, to see how I’ve changed. My friend Iris wrote me, “You went from shy to superstar,” which made me beam. That letter-writer-me who cried about rejections and bad reviews recently became longlisted for the Joyce Carol Oates Literary Prize.
That longing-for-love-me just celebrated 31 years of an incredibly happy marriage, full of conversation. And that friendless-feeling-me is still writing almost daily emails to Jo and Victoria, only now we are able to get in yearly visits as well. I can’t wait to see my emails 10 years from now because getting older doesn’t stop growth. I have written proof of that.
Do you ever go back and re-read old letters or journals? Let us know in the comments below.
Mel Haasch
Follow Article Topics: Relationships
