A few years ago my best friend gifted me all the letters that I had written to her since we had started exchanging letters our freshman year in college. I had also saved all of the letters that she had written to me. I stored them in a box in the garage. We had both stayed in California for school. I went to UC Davis near Sacramento and she went to Cal Poly San Luis Obispo on the central coast. Separated by 300 miles or five hour drive felt like a world apart. On top of that, we rarely made phone calls because it was too expensive on a student budget. And of course, there was no email, no Internet, none of the instant messaging and kaleidoscope of communication options that we have today. We didn’t even have computers. (gasp!!)

The semester that we graduated in 1994, we were told that in the course of our lives things would change a lot and that life would be completely different in ways we couldn’t even imagine. Oh, what truth that was.

That box of letters sat in my house for a while before I was ready to open it and relive those youthful days that swung like a pendulum from wild and carefree some weeks to tumultuous and anxiety provoking in others. When I finally did dive in, I was flooded with emotions and memories, some good, some having best forgotten. The walk down memory lane didn’t end with the one box. I excavated to uncover all of the letters that had been written to me to see what else there was to discover. What struck the most me looking back more than a quarter century was just how different life was then and how writing letters easily and organically fit into daily life.

The first thing I noticed was that I wrote letters because I was broke. Even though we lived in the same state, those calls added up fast. And don’t think that 19 year girls would possibly able talk to their BFF for “a quick chat”, it had to be a full session, all or nothing. We had to share every detail of every experience, especially regarding the guys we were interested in and going out with. Many letters included some version of: “I totally want to talk to you but I can’t afford it this week, so I’m writing a letter instead.” I would then go into a full stream of telling my latest stories as if I were going to burst if I didn’t share them with someone. Not just someone, but someone who understood why those stories were important to me. I spared nothing because I wanted to be sure she totally understood my experience and I hoped we would be able to talk about it eventually.

Another pattern that was apparent was that I wrote because I felt depressed. It’s hard to imagine now, but back in the early 1990s we all had plenty of spare time and sometimes being away from home felt lonely. The letter would start with “I’m so depressed, I’m listening to Morrissey right now. Every time it finishes, I rewind the tape and listen again.” Or “I’ve been depressed all week, my life is a mess.” Then I would write out all of my doubts and fears and insecurities. At the end of these missives, I would usually apologize for such a depressing letter, but I felt so much better because it was all released. Even in a letter that wouldn’t be received for a few days, I felt heard and connected. It was a private letter and it was safe to write down intimate thoughts without an ounce of worry that anyone other than my friend would see them.

Such expression of depression is interesting because I’m not typically a depressed type person, but in these letters, it was ok to say I was depressed in that moment. I acknowledged feeling really down in the dumps. Being able to write about it in the confidence of someone close to me helped a lot with clarity and moving through the challenges along the way. The same effect can happen with journaling in terms of self-expression; however the connection to the other person is very powerful and was evident when I had the privilege of reading those letters that I had written so many years ago. It’s hard to imagine now how to even articulate feeling depressed because it’s so associated with severe depression, but then it was normal vernacular.

I wrote letters because I was bored. Some days, I didn’t want to to study, my roommate was at work or whatever and I just wanted something to do; so I would write a letter. The boredom letters were more factual talking about the weather or my class schedule the following week. I would tell where I was in that specific moment and why I’m alone writing a letter, pretty mundane stuff really. At the end of those particular letters, I always had a plan for what I was going to go next such as, “Well, I’m off to the record store now, I hope they have the new album. Talk to you later.” Sitting down and writing a brief letter resolved my boredom and I carried on with my day.

Probably the most surprising discovery in terms of comparison to what life is like now was that some letters mentioned plans for an upcoming visit. I can remember that we really did do that. “I’m gonna leave after lunch on Friday and should get there by 6.” We planned visits to each other BY POST! And that wasn’t actually that long ago really – I’m not that old. It was possible that we might not even talk by phone before that trip, but I knew she would expect me; I had written and told her after all. Of course, we would have planned trips over a sequence of letters, but I never worried that she may not have gotten the message or anything else. If she wasn’t going to be there, she would simply leave a note at the door and I would  wait for her or meet her at a designated place. This didn’t happen often between the two of us, but it did happen. I can’t even imagine doing something like that now? Sending a letter in the mail to a friend or relative telling the date and time of arrival for a visit later in the month. Yep, it’s all there in the letters.

Finally, and something I had completely forgotten; in the years right after college, we wrote letters from everywhere and to anywhere in the world. When we did our Eurorail trip for 10 weeks, we received letters from loved ones in various locations. Even when backpacking in rural Mexico and Guatemala or other far-off places, we sent and received mail! An actual letter in hand that someone took the time to write to us and write our names on the envelope arrived in all kinds of exotic places. We sent letters to any city addressed with the name and labeled Poste Restante to stay in touch with each other. Then, when arriving at a new place, we would go straight to the post office to see if there was mail waiting. The trips would be pre-planned enough that we always knew where to send the next letter. It was such fun to receive those letters and then write a response and update on our travels. Those letters were fuel for the soul.

Oh how times have changed. What do we do nowadays when we’re bored or broke or feeling depressed? Social media and a million other digital distractions so readily fill in the gaps. Modern technology is actually incredible and we’re able talk and video-chat across continents and often for free. My friend and I do still write letters, snail mail between California and London, although it’s much less often; and it takes much longer than it used to despite everything else being much faster. Unfortunately, it doesn’t happen as a matter of our usual routines either. Sitting down to write a letter is something we have to “fit” into our busy lives. And while we are in the age of communication and information, our experiences will be remembered very differently when looking back in another twenty-five years. Instead of a special box in the garage or the corner of the closet, it is all memorialized in the cloud (which as far as I know partially exists somewhere in Tennessee). I treasure those letters and the extraordinary friendship of safety and trust, shared joys and shared heartbreaks, that developed as we wrote them and they traveled across the miles.