I’ve always been better on paper than in person. Conversations trip me up. I lose my train of thought, I soften my words, I leave out the parts that matter most because I don’t want to make things uncomfortable.
But when I write, something opens up. The truth comes out cleaner. More honest. Less afraid.
That’s why, during one of the hardest years of my life, I wrote two letters. One was to someone who had hurt me. The other was to myself.
The First Letter
The first letter was to a friend. Someone I’d been close to for over a decade. We had a falling out that year over something that seems small in hindsight but felt enormous at the time.
She had shared something private about me with people I didn’t know. Not maliciously. She didn’t mean to hurt me. But she did, and when I confronted her, she got defensive instead of apologizing.
We stopped talking. For months, I carried the weight of that silence.
One night, I sat down and wrote her a letter. I told her how I felt. I told her what the friendship had meant to me. I told her that I missed her but that I couldn’t pretend the hurt didn’t happen.
I mailed it the next morning. She called me two weeks later. We talked for an hour. We didn’t fix everything, but we started.
That letter did what I hoped it would. It reopened a door.
The Second Letter
The second letter was harder to write. It was addressed to me.
I wrote it on a night when I felt particularly low. I had been blaming myself for the fallout with my friend. I had been replaying every conversation, wondering what I could have done differently. I was angry at myself for not being the kind of person who could just let things go.
So I wrote to myself the way I would write to someone I loved.
I told myself that it was okay to feel hurt. That my feelings were valid even if they were messy. That asking for an apology wasn’t too much. That I deserved the same gentleness I gave to everyone else.
I sealed the letter in an envelope and put it in my nightstand drawer. I didn’t plan to read it again.
Years Later
I found the letter three years later, during a move. I almost threw it away without opening it. But curiosity got the better of me.
Reading it felt like hearing from a version of myself I’d forgotten. A version that was struggling but still trying. A version that was brave enough to admit she was in pain.
What struck me most was this line: “You don’t have to earn the right to be treated well. You already deserve it.”
I cried when I read that. Not because I was sad, but because I still needed to hear it. Three years later, and I was still learning to believe it.
What I Learned
The letter I mailed repaired a friendship. That mattered. That was real and valuable and I don’t regret it.
But the letter I kept repaired something inside me. It taught me that the way we talk to ourselves matters as much as the way we talk to others. Maybe more.
We spend so much time crafting messages to the people in our lives. Careful texts. Thoughtful emails. Words chosen to heal, to explain, to connect.
But when was the last time you sat down and wrote something kind to yourself?
Not a journal entry. Not a to-do list. A letter. The kind you would write to a friend who was going through something difficult. The kind where you say, “I see what you’re carrying, and I want you to know it’s going to be okay.”
You might not need it today. But someday you’ll find it in a drawer, and it will say exactly what you need to hear.
