Correspondence

Before you ask, yes I did read the book. And while it’s heading out to my Little Free Library to soon be someone else’s, I enjoyed it very much. Although I could never match Sybil’s frequency and dedication to her preferred medium, I, too, am a correspondent.

I did rely on pen and paper once, though. I am Generation X after all. (And yes, of course I have proof.)

I’m grateful there are now other means in which to correspond, since Parkinson’s is stealing away my once good penmanship. Texts, email, Whatsapp–I don’t discriminate (although I’d like to think I’ll drop all Meta-owned sources…someday). And while I love a good meme or cat video, I am being specific about content. The correspondence I’m speaking of is delivered through sentences and ripe paragraphs. It contains thoughts, half-baked or fully formed, visual snapshots of interiors and exteriors. Though the content varies based on my relationship to the receiver, it’s always juiced. And that is most likely due to the containers that hold the exchange: there is only room for us two (or in some cases, three). The real bangers happen when the expectation to perform for the (social) public is removed. (You have ruined us, Socials.)

Consider this as a gratitude list: I’m so grateful for my correspondence friends. And to preserve anonymity, I’ll leave off the name-dropping (and also, ew).

–This correspondence began as an accountability opportunity but quickly became more than just checking tasks off a list. When women are free to be honest about not just goals but raw desires, when the pressure to perform or one-up isn’t there, women get to be transparent about the real reason middle-aged women aren’t out here “crushing our goals”. It’s because of things like care-taking for kids and parents, menopausal hormonal upheaval, health setbacks, emotional distress over our communities, and just being plain tired and needing a minute. There is movement, but it’s slow and no life-coach-y yapping in our ears about ‘just change your mindset, duh’. And work that has some longevity legs takes time, it’s not ‘content’. I now think about our correspondence not as accountability anymore. It is grace.

–This person and I have had a few stops and starts to our correspondence but when we’re on, we are on. Separated by fifteen-ish years and five thousand-ish miles, it’s like having a penpal but make it hilarious, sometimes catty (okay, that’s me) and filled with unadulterated mutual admiration (and not the tit-for-tat transactional kind). If this image of mutual adoration makes you feel something, you know how rare this air is.

–Although it occasionally wavers into other territory, this correspondence is mostly about the long and arduous process of making a body of work. Again, it’s not about art made in a day and mostly for (social media) public consumption. It is about the agony, the depths, the failures, and all the conversations about regrets of late-bloomage and a celebration of the Third Act in dredging your life for art. When the neediness of justification and validation is removed, you get to talk about the wild pull of desire that compels us to make.

–Having been friends for over three decades, we could communicate with emojis if we had to. However, we favor the long updates that you have to send in multiple texts. Beginning with saved letters dating back to 1989, we could construct a profile of each other that would be more accurate than our own Mothers could convey.

–Although we have the most robust conversations IRL, we also correspond through all the mediums and daily. Memes and reels are a part of this, but so are conversations about corporations, leaders and systems from which we are divesting, the people for whom we are throwing our hat into the ring of support, who we are challenging, emailing, harassing to make our communities better. Kudos to the social media warriors, that work takes its own flavor of stamina however, this correspondence is as much resistance as it is erecting our tiny and nimble coalition–all with unmitigated love and respect for each other.

This is not an exhaustive list, but it is worth mentioning: everyone here is in recovery. There’s a below-the-surface dive you get to take that isn’t so readily available in other correspondence. That is what compels me to go all in, and I know I’ll get the same in return. These sentences we pass to each other, they are more than descriptive, more than a vein of connection—they are pieces of art and imagination that could stand on their own. And they do, but only for an audience of few.

Are you a correspondent? The comments are open! I’d love to hear about your experience.