Last week, I dropped ten handwritten letters into the post box. By now, many of them have reached their destinations, and the replies I get are not on paper but on WhatsApp. “Got your letter!” friends text me, attaching little heart emojis or blurry photos of envelopes torn open. It’s an odd mismatch: I spend hours pressing pen into paper, only for the response to arrive instantly, glowing on my phone screen. It makes me smile, but also highlights the contrast between two very different worlds of communication.

For most people my age, the idea of writing letters by hand is an anachronism. It belongs to school assignments, grandparents, or films where lovers wait weeks for a single page. Today, why would you spend time searching for stamps, hunting down an inland letter card, and standing in line at the post office when you can just send a message that delivers in seconds? And yet, something about this slowness, the deliberate pace of writing and waiting, makes the act more intimate than anything I could ever type out on a keyboard.

When I sit down to write a letter, I don’t just jot down words. I notice my handwriting: sometimes neat, sometimes slipping into a hurried scrawl. I notice how the ink smudges when I drag my palm across the paper, or how certain sentences sprawl because I had too much to say and too little space. Every letter becomes a portrait of that moment in my life. Unlike digital messages that vanish into chat logs, a letter is physical. It carries traces of me - the pressure of the pen, maybe a faint coffee stain, sometimes even the rhythm of my moods.

And because it takes effort, it forces me to think differently. I cannot backspace my way out of a clumsy phrase. I cannot rearrange paragraphs at will. I have to accept the mess, the crossings-out, the mistakes. That imperfection feels strangely more authentic than the polished sentences I might compose on a screen. When you receive my letter, you don’t just receive my words. You receive the hours I spent writing, the cramp in my wrist, the thought that went into choosing stationery, and the walk to the postbox. That labor, visible in ink and paper, is its own form of love.

Letters also teach patience. In our hyper-connected world, we’re used to replies within minutes. A delayed response can spark anxiety. But with letters, waiting is built into the form. Once I’ve sent one out, I have no control over its journey. It might arrive in three days or three weeks, depending on the whims of postal services. That waiting period creates anticipation, a small suspended space where I imagine the recipient unfolding the page, their expression shifting as they read. And when a reply finally comes - if it comes - it feels less like an obligation and more like a gift.

Of course, letter writing isn’t entirely nostalgic romance. There’s also humor in the mismatch between eras. Like I said, most of the people I wrote to didn’t write back on paper. They snapped a photo of my envelope, or sent me a lovely emoji at the fact that I still use old-fashioned letters. It’s a reminder that letters today live in a hybrid world: part of their meaning comes from being analog in a digital age. They are at once serious and playful, an act of resistance against efficiency, and also a quirky experiment in connection.

There’s a deeper politics, too. In a world that pushes speed, productivity, and constant online availability, writing letters insists on slowness. It says: I will not measure my care for you in typing speed or read receipts. I will measure it in ink stains, in the ache of writing pages by hand, in the fact that I chose to spend this irreplaceable time on you. Letters resist the capitalist logic of “instant results.” They ask us to linger, to slow down, to value presence over performance.

For me, sending out those ten letters was not just about reaching people. It was also about grounding myself. I live much of my life online - writing essays, scrolling newsfeeds, trading messages that blur into endless conversations. Letter writing broke that cycle. It gave me the rare feeling of creating something complete, tangible, finished. Each sealed envelope was a small closure, a reminder that I can send a piece of myself into the world in a form that doesn’t demand constant updates or notifications.

And yet, the strangeness lingers. My friends may not always reply with letters. But that doesn’t diminish the intimacy of what I’ve done. Even if my words return to me only as WhatsApp screenshots, I know that at least for a moment, someone held a page I wrote, felt the texture of the paper, and saw my messy handwriting. In that act of holding, there is closeness -closer than any glowing screen.

So maybe handwritten letters will never make a grand comeback. Maybe they will remain a niche hobby for romantics, eccentrics, or those of us hungry for a slower rhythm of life. That’s fine. Because each letter doesn’t need to change the world. It only needs to bridge two people across distance and time, in a way that feels irreplaceably human.

And so I’ll keep writing. Not for tradition, not for nostalgia, but because in a world that values speed above all else, choosing slowness feels like choosing love.

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