The Value of "Real Mail"

So, probably about a year ago I signed up for the Letter Writer's Alliance. It's a pretty small fee, and you get a cute little membership kit and access to part of their shop that is members only. But the biggest thing I signed up for is they do pen pals.

I've done pen pal services before and they always kind of faltered, especially because a lot of them seem designed for like a one time exchange. I wanted to actually write back and forth and establish a real connection. So I signed up, and what they do is they send you one address, and they send your address to one person. So you get two pen pals right off the bat.

In addition, at some point last year I started an effort to send two postcards and one letter each week to friends and family that have said they want to get more snail mail. In part because I like snail mail, and in part because I have literally an entire wooden chest full of postcards, stationary, and stickers and some of them have been in there since I was in middle school which was a very long time ago. And I told myself I couldn't get new stationary and stickers until I used up what I had (I've only kind of stuck to that, but done okay).

It's been great. I don't get replies as often as I send things out, for sure, but I love putting together everything to send stuff out and it's a nice way to stop and do something non-screen related for a while. I put on some music (I can't do podcasts and write words) and write for a little while. I made a checklist to keep track of where I was in my rotation, so that everybody gets stuff pretty regularly. It's just on the graph paper in the back of my Passion Planner.

I buy cool stamps, but I also get stamps in big packs so I don't have to worry about it that often. There's no bulk discount for stamps, but if you get forever ones you save some money if you have some when they go up. I've also gotten a few wax seal stamps and wax, but that's another post about how that's going.

My pen pals from LWA have been great. I've really enjoyed getting to know them, and seeing what all we have in common. They're both very awesome women. A lot of LWA posts make it look like you have to do all this fancy mail art to fit in and that's definitely not the case, my pen pals do all that sometimes and not others. I will put together what I can depending on how busy I am, I figure I'd rather write a letter and send it than put it off until I can make it all impressive. The point is to write in the first place.

I've been getting more mail, which makes me happy and making connections, which also makes me happy. And I know that I'm making at least a small part of my friend's days nice when they open their mailboxes too. Just remember if you start that it's not about getting replies (you'll get some, I'm sure, especially if you do pen pals) but it's about the joy of sending the mail. If you start from that, it'll be great.

Send more letters in 2017!

Postcrossing

I've been collecting postcards for years. I don't remember when it started, but it became the one souvenir I wanted from each place I went. I also wanted people to send me postcards from their trips.

For a little while in college, I belonged to a postcard community on Livejournal. I loved it, and it was a ton of fun, but I went a bit too gung-ho and spent so much money on postage that I had to stop. Plus, finals rolled around and time got away from me.

But I still asked people to send me stuff, and still picked them up myself.

A few months ago, while I was at an event for my most recent film, I was sitting around and talking to one of the journalists that I had gotten to know. She said that she decided to start sending postcards as a hobby, and that she had set up a webpage for it to get random addresses and try to send a certain number over the course of a year.

Talking to Jacqueline got me excited about postcards again. But for a few months I still only sent them to her, which was great. We started sending cards back and forth from our travels, and I loved stopping at airport gift shops to pick out a card for her every time I went somewhere.

Then she posted about this website called Postcrossing. The idea of it is just that you sign up to send a card to somebody (usually in another country) and when they say that they received it, the site gives your address to a random person to get a card.

In the midst of this, I was cleaning up my house and sorted through this giant box of stationary that I have. I realized I still had silly girly stationary from when I was a kid, stuff I'd never send for anything official now, and probably wouldn't even send to most people.

So a few weeks ago, I signed up for Postcrossing to clear out my inventory of old postcards and I started sending my friends letters on cheesy Lisa Frank paper. It's been a ton of fun, I've gotten a few cards back but getting mail in return wasn't my primary goal, just a nice reward. I've gotten several really awesome cards from all over the world already.

I went through my old box where I store all my mail I've gotten over the years, and I found stacks of letters from pen pals that I met at summer camps, random people from high school that I mailed letters to during the summer...it was just this nice feeling, having these letters in my hand. So I decided I was just going to send some more mail.

There's a challenge every year called "A Month of Letters" that I just missed this year. I plan to do it next year, but in the meantime I'm just making a bigger effort to send more mail.