Love Letters
Teenage angst transformed into something more beautiful
It has been so long since I’ve posted anything here. I think about doing it often, but I’m constantly putting it off - waiting for inspiration to strike and the ‘right time’ to reveal itself. In reality, so much has happened in the past 6 months that I don’t really know where to start. Karl and I talked last week about our creative practices and how hard we’re both finding it to get started, now we’re faced with the wide open space that we’ve carved out for ourselves primarily for this reason. Much like the lessons learned in lockdown, we’re realising (again) that it’s not really about time at all.
Following that conversation, I made a commitment to myself to go back through my sprawling files and publish the things I’ve written that are ‘almost’ done. I can’t count the number of drafts stuck in Google Docs that are in that state; floating around in the digital abyss because I decided at some point that they weren’t ready. And then time would march on, and whatever I had written would fade from my memory, and be replaced with new ideas, new bits of writing: some that I took the plunge with and published, and others that remain languishing in the Cloud. It’s not like I have a giant list of Substack subscribers, or a posting schedule to maintain, but I made a commitment to myself that I want to honour. And besides, it feels pointless to have it all sitting there gathering digital dust. I’m trying to subscribe to the idea that ‘done is better than perfect’ - something that feels almost impossible for a recovering perfectionist like me. But here we are!
I spent the past weekend with 5 of my oldest friends. Being with them for three days of uninterrupted time was very special. We reminisced - naturally - but I was also struck by how intertwined our lives have been, and how connected we’ve remained since leaving school, despite the different paths we’ve all taken. Our conversations nudged me to think about this piece again, which I wrote after moving back from America in 2020.
Sorting through the loft after 5 years of being away, I came across what I call my “life box.” Amongst the diaries, school reports, Glastonbury Festival programmes and photographs, there are two old Dr. Marten shoe boxes. One is filled with birthday cards and postcards, and the other with letters. At some point - I can’t remember when - I instilled order on the scrawled mess of papers, and now the letters are clustered into larger envelopes and plastic wallets, each with the name of the sender scribbled on the front, or in some cases a collective: “primary school”, “college”, “boys.” Only very rarely do I look at the letters, and each time I do, I’m possessed by an odd mix of melancholy and love. Yesterday, I opened the box and tentatively flicked through a few envelopes. I knew the lure, and I didn’t want to fall into a black hole of nostalgia. Yet an hour later, I was in the same position: cold hands, body twisted; my leg cramping from being curled underneath me for so long. I try to place why reading these old letters infuses me with such a deep ache. I’ve always put it down to my sentimental nature, but here in 2020, with so much time gone by, it feels like something different.
In the years after leaving school I would look at the letters much more frequently than I do now, and back then, I’d often feel sadness: so many of my friends and I had gone our separate ways and the safe little bubble that we existed in had burst. Yesterday I felt a different twinge of melancholy for what had passed: the knowledge that not only have I aged - that it’s now over half my life ago that the events contained in the pages of the letters took place - but also that many of the things that gave life meaning back then, are no longer present. As an adult, my life is full of ‘adult’ concerns - mortgage statements and pay-checks and flossing - and the sweet innocence of connection and discovery that I find when I read the letters often feels far away.
Like many teens, I harboured a lot of intense, unhappy feelings about myself during that time, yet however strong the feelings of self-loathing were, they couldn’t touch me when I was with my friends, who I loved desperately. We weren’t the popular kids by any means, but we formed a solid pack, who sat in the middle of the secondary school hierarchy and existed virtually untouched by its politics. United by a mix of historical friendship and our love of music, there were upwards of 15 or 20 of us at any one time, who would cluster together in self-designated classrooms at lunchtimes. At the weekends, we’d trail around Lewes, or line up outside the Brighton Centre in the cold, to watch our favourite bands. We were an almost even split of genders, and everyone got on; with unlikely friendship pairings secured in school and deepened by long, rambling phone calls that lasted into the evening. Then, berated by our parents, we’d hang up the phone and spend the rest of the evening writing letters that would be passed to each other first thing the next morning, and then the cycle would start again.
Reading some of those old letters yesterday, I was struck by the temporary nature of our experiences and the brief snapshot of time they represent. I formed deep bonds with my friends by talking on the landline and writing letters - something that would be completely alien for teens these days. Similarly, the commentary about our lives contained in the letters is located firmly in the past. Descriptions of TV characters I’d forgotten about, or the late night shows on the local radio, or talk of saving up to buy a CD, or lining up to buy a ticket for a show in person: all gone. But I also had an overwhelming feeling of specificity and connection: to myself, to that group of people, to those places. It’s an old cliché that when you are a teenager, you feel like you’re the only person in the world who has ever felt the way you do, but the cliché exists for a reason. Our pains and hopes and dreams, although universal in theme, were all unique to us. I used to write off my experiences as teenage angst, plain and simple, but I can see now how they were also created and maintained by the specifics of my family dynamics and the relationship between my parents. And when I looked through my box of letters yesterday, I was able to see the way in which the conversations that took place between my friends and I were also unique and specific, and how they shaped the person I am today.
There is a lot in the news at the moment about mental health. I recently skirted around an argument about it with my dad, who, like many of his generation, finds it hard to understand the ‘snowflakes:’ those millenials and Gen Zs who seem so fragile and unable to cope with the world. I love talking to my dad, and we usually go around the houses for a bit before agreeing to disagree. I try to remember that we’re coming at life from very different perspectives. That his parents lived through the war and that he was brought up being told “that’s just how it is,” and how to embody the British stiff upper lip. He only knows what he knows, and I only know what I know. And besides, it’s an inevitable part of life: each generation wants to parent differently from their parents, but whatever happens, there will always be something that imprints. The culture also has a massive impact on behaviour and how we make our way in the world.
While the boomers fucked up my generation in their own special way (just as their parents did to them before), I like to think that we found our own path through young adulthood in a way that made sense to us. We bonded through talking, yes, but we also made sense of our feelings through writing. We scrawled furiously, sometimes to multiple people each evening, pouring our hearts onto the paper, looking for an understanding that wasn’t easily accessible elsewhere. I said to Karl recently that I remember feeling so understood and held by my friends during that time: certain in my uncertainty. Looking through the letters now, I realise that superficially, I was miserable, but I was also very secure in my identity when I was with those people. And how many of them do I even know now? I have just two close friends in my life from school who I meet regularly, and a further three who I catch up with once or twice a year. But in that Dr Marten box exists the words of so many more. Scribbled notes on pages torn from the regulation “homework diary.” The drama and heartache of being 15, 16, inscribed on pages torn from an art sketchbook.
Around the time I turned 14, I felt myself withdrawing from my family and from the creative activities I’d previously loved. Instead, I threw myself into my friendships, desperate to feel seen and to gain a sense of belonging. For so many years, I looked back at this behaviour scornfully. I separated myself from the vulnerable teenage me, and brushed off my intense feelings. I laughed about it, even mocked myself (“teenage angst!”), but underneath that breezy disavowal of my own experiences was a deeper shame: that I had been so “needy”; that I had found it hard to cope, that I had sought validation and love from my friends by talking about my feelings and writing them letters. Now, after going through therapy, I can feel more love for the teenage me. I see now that I simply didn’t know what to do with my feelings. I’m a human, so naturally I wanted to feel connection and closeness and love and attention and affection. I didn’t know that it wasn’t necessary to hurt myself to get it.
For years, I felt acutely embarrassed that I used to cut myself. To deal with these feelings, I created two stories around it. The first was the aforementioned “teenage angst” narrative. I laughed and rolled my eyes. I blew it away, cast it aside. It was not me, it was just something I had done when I hadn’t known any better. Nothing to see here. The other story, which was more prevalent when cutting was still a habit, was that it helped me to stay calm and in control; that it afforded me a release, a way to let my feelings out. I parroted the lines I’d heard the famous self harmers use, without really being sure of why I was doing what I was doing. I was not an attention seeker in the conventional sense - I didn’t parade my cuts and scars for all to see. In fact, it was the opposite: I was deeply ashamed of myself and took great pains to cover up, sweating in long sleeves through endless summer days. On the rare occasion someone did notice, a shockwave of adrenaline would shoot through my body as my mind grasped for words to try and fill the space, more often than not ending in a mumbled “it’s nothing” as I looked away, palms damp and heart racing. But to those people who were my friends, the people who I’d connected with, who knew me; who wrote me letters: I didn’t hide from them. I would never have admitted it then - I don’t think I was even conscious of it - but I think, on some level, I did want them to notice. I wanted them to worry and care about my sadness. I wanted to feel like I mattered, somehow.
And, for the most part, they did care. In our first experiences of drinking and parties, we would have long rambling conversations about our feelings in our parents’ lounges, or static caravans, or back gardens. And when we weren’t testing the waters with alcohol (which in a short time would become a new panacea for me), we always had the letters. During that time, many people I knew didn’t like themselves very much, and these feelings manifested themselves through various self-destructive behaviours. While I wish that we hadn’t all felt so wretched, it did mean that it felt like an acceptable topic of conversation, even if the actual truth of what we were feeling was reserved for the letters. We didn’t have the vocabulary around mental health or anxiety and depression that teenagers have today, but when we wrote to each other - about eating disorders and social anxiety and self-harm - it still felt normal. It wasn’t, of course, but this was not something I understood as I muddled through my life. I stopped cutting around the age of twenty, more out of shame than anything else, but the urge to do it never really left me. As I hit my forties, I finally let it go; finally realised that it was an unhealthy coping mechanism, and that I had other choices.
I want to throw it all out. We’re moving towards low impact living; having less rather than more. What does it serve me, having this box of memories in the loft? A box of people’s thoughts and feelings. A time capsule from 1995 to 1999. A penpal I met at a holiday camp who I had completely forgotten about. We wrote to each other for years. She was a huge football fan and when I skim read a couple of the letters, all she talked about were her favourite players from Leicester FC. We had absolutely nothing in common. I don’t know why I kept it up - a people pleaser even back then. I have a huge stack of letters from one of my oldest friends; a girl in the school year below me who I only met a few times before she moved to New Zealand for 5 years. The entire foundation of our friendship is contained in sticker-covered letters, all of which begin with a scribbled note of the song we were listening to as we wrote. I have a folder with letters from various Manic Street Preachers fans who I found on forums and in fanzines, with whom I kept up scattered, tortured correspondence. Letters from my cousin, my older sister by proxy, who took me to my first Blur gigs, and then wrote to me of wild nights clubbing at University in London. My school pals and boyfriends; my next door neighbour. All too quickly we grew up, discovered college, university, had our horizons expanded, and the letters were no more. Drinking and drugs became the portal to sharing, and email took over as the preferred means of contact. I think it’s time for the letters to be gone, but I’m also struggling to let them go. The archivist in me also wants to keep them because they represent a snapshot of teenage life in the 90s; a moment in time that won’t ever be replicated.
I recently had an email exchange with a close friend in Detroit. We’ve both been going through some stuff, and it’s resulted in a few messages back and forth. The other day, I read through a long reply from her, and felt that familiar sense of warmth wash over me; the open-hearted feeling that I get when I’m in true connection with another. Although we facetime and text, and are experimenting with voice notes, I’ve been surprised at how much I’ve loved the process of written communication; how much I’ve enjoyed the experience of, once again, laying my heart bare on the page, and receiving another’s heart in return. I may be typing rather than writing, but it’s felt like muscle memory, like writing letters all those years ago.
When I thought about my recent communication with my friend in America, I noticed a thought flash through my head: that the act of writing about my feelings seemed quite ‘teenage.’ Much like the shame I felt about cutting, a similar voice in my head rolled out a similar criticism: it’s indulgent, it’s needy, it’s immature. When I was able to disentangle my actual thoughts from those of my inner critic, I just felt sad. Why does a part of me still believe that sharing my thoughts and feelings with another is immature and self-indulgent? Of course, people share all the time now, but it doesn’t feel quite the same. It’s curated and polished: a feed. I don’t really know what it’s like to be a teenager these days, but I hope - despite the proliferation of digital communication - that those conversations where you try to figure out who you are, together, are still happening.
As adults, it feels like the questions of how we really are, get lost in the endless cycle of small talk: how’s work, how’s the family, what are you doing for Christmas. Everyone is so busy, and time together often feels fleeting; snatched. There’s a perception that once we’re past our mid-twenties or even early thirties, we've figured this shit out, when it’s actually the opposite. In my experience, it’s exactly when the wheels start to come off; where things begin to unravel; where all the unresolved shit from the previous 30 years makes itself known. Loudly. Conversely, this is when we need our friends the most; this is when you could really do with the support of a loving heart, and the space and time to write a long letter.
At this point it tails off. It wasn’t finished, and so I left it, and then I forgot about it. It’s funny, reading it now at the end of 2023. It’s almost like another time capsule - a portal into how things were three years ago. Before everything changed. Before the pandemic. Before all the things that broke me to bits happened. Before I stitched myself back together. Back in 2020, when I originally wrote this piece, I still felt an ache when I thought about the letters: an ache for the freedom of expression I allowed myself; for the unabashed way I engaged; for the thrill of validation, of recognition, when I was undersood by another. At that time, I felt unmoored, having returned to the UK after 5 years away. I felt distant from everyone and I longed for the familiarity of what I had just left. I didn’t feel quite able to let my guard down, to be fully myself, to connect in the ways that felt meaningful to me.
I don’t feel it so much now. One reason is because I’ve got into voice notes, which has been a total revelation for me and has deepened some of my closest friendships in ways I could never have imagined. Another is because I’m writing so much more, so that creative itch is being scratched. But the big one, I think, is precisely because of the way my life has unfolded in the past three years. I’ve been cracked open, and it’s forced me to be vulnerable and honest in ways that I haven’t done for years. Probably since I was a teenager, sharing my deepest pains with my pals in letters.
I recently read an inspiring essay about time by Alain de Botton that was featured on the wonderful Oldster substack. He says that the reason we feel like our childhood is so long is because of the sheer volume of new experiences we’re having. To live longer, he argues, we must focus less on health fads that claim to increase time lived, and more on new experiences that slow down our perception of time itself. His words echoed in my mind as I re-read my musings on my teenage letter writing habit. As in childhood, we continue to have a lot of formative, unique experiences in our teenage years. We also experience a lot of new feelings. The emotional blueprint established in childhood is rolled out, as we jump on the hormone-fueled rollercoaster and try to figure out who we are in the world, alongside our friends who were doing the same. I think that’s there’s been a version of that process happening to me over the past few years, too. I realised that the reason I don’t feel attached to the letters, and all the love and validation they contain any more, is because I’ve finally worked out how to give myself love and validation. It’s not perfect but I’m getting there.
I still have the letters in their battered Doc Marten box. I think I’ll keep them for a little bit longer. They’re currently in my old bedroom in the loft at my mum’s (where they were first read - they’ve come home!) waiting to be moved to Wales. Maybe that’ll be the time to have a ceremonial bonfire, where all the words and feelings can finally evaporate in the smoke. For now, I’ll let them stay in their box for a little longer. Let them exist as a reminder to talk to friends about the important things, to let my guard down, to show vulnerablity. I’ll let them stay there as a reassurance: that amongst pain and heartache, there is also, always, beauty and connection to be found.
