Welcome to Group Project, a series on the many ways young people are building and engaging with community. From queer resistance to finding new hobbies to forging alternate paths, working together is more important than ever. Here's how young people are getting off their phones and seeking community IRL.
Think of a close friend and try to recall the last time you saw their handwriting. Beyond personality and appearance, does their penmanship come to mind, or is there a blank page where scrawled-out sentences should be? Once considered the key to one’s innermost being, handwriting has largely taken a backseat in everyday life. Reports indicate people are writing by hand less and less, so if you find yourself struggling to recall your friends’ or classmates’ script, you are far from alone.
Our need for handwriting has withered. Texting and DMing have taken over as daily forms of communication, especially when corresponding with friends. However, writing letters indicates you’ve taken the time not just to reach out to someone, but to lay down your thoughts and send them out, for your recipient to eagerly await the note's arrival. Even as texting or calling are ever-appealing in ease and timeliness, pockets of young people are forgoing convenience for something slower-paced, a lot more analog, and all the more meaningful.
Just over two years ago, college student Ansley Jordan, 22, received a message from her long-distance friend Mimi Butler, 25, who wanted to send her a letter. It was late December 2022, after the rush and chaos of finals season, and Jordan was home for winter break. Though the two often ate lunch in the art room together when they were in high school, they did not really become friends until after Butler graduated in 2018. They started following each other on Instagram, gradually interacting more and more by way of story likes and close friends posts, as if to make up for all those former years spent “parallel” to one another, as per Butler.
Handwritten letters brought their friendship to a far deeper level, and when Jordan returned to campus for the spring semester, there was a large note in the mailroom to greet her. “Mimi poured a bunch of glitter in her first package to me, and of course when I opened it, there were little pink stars and holographic hearts all over my table,” Jordan tells Teen Vogue. “She had sent me a Sonny Angel, stickers, a little ballerina, candy cigarettes, and handwritten notes.”
The array of trinkets and ephemera marked the start of many more packages and letters to come. Now, Jordan and Butler treat their correspondence as a subscription to one another, a catch up of their recent travels, everyday happenings, and all the things they’ve been into. “It’s kind of like my diary, I think. She is my diary now,” explains Butler, who loves when Jordan includes her artwork in letters — she always sticks the new ones on her fridge. Jordan enjoys the random timestamped observations her penpal lists out: A brief one or two sentence note about something the 25-year-old has seen or overheard in her day. Jordan’s sticker collection has grown as well, from the novel additions Butler always brings back from her trips abroad. “I had never really penpalled before Mimi and I started writing to each other. Then, she unveiled this whole world to me,” Jordan says.
“I keep [the letters] all together, because for some reason I think somebody will want to look at them one day,” says Butler, who stores everything in a USPS crate, after outgrowing a smaller box beneath her bed. “Someone might give them to a thrift store, and maybe two girls like us will find and cherish them.” The handwritten notes don’t always need to be particularly profound. Sometimes, it’s less about the words and more about the effort to connect with someone they care about. “We often write about what our favorite coffee is at the moment. Are people going to still be drinking lattes all the time 40 years from now? I don’t know,” says Jordan. “But I hope people can look at the letters and think, ‘I should write to my friend too.’”
Neuroscientist and professor at Norwegian University of Science and Technology Audrey van der Meer, who researches handwriting and cognitive function, says writing to your friends can make you smarter.
“Since writing by hand forces you to use your body and all your senses, you are using your brain more and in a much better way, accessing brain regions that help you to learn,” van der Meer says, whose research has backed that idea up. She adds that writing letters can also cultivate deeper bonds. “There is time to reflect over what you intend to write and what you want to express, which ultimately will lead to deeper personal expression and connection.”
For siblings Nolen and Adeline Bryant, penpalling has become a defining, and especially healing, foundation of sisterhood.
In 2015, Adeline, 23, was transitioning from middle to high school when she resumed penpalling with older sister Nolen, 28, who had just graduated high school. The eldest of three siblings, Nolen moved from Georgia to Massachusetts for college and was the first in her family to go out of state — an adjustment Adeline didn’t realize could have had such an impact on her. “I was trying to figure out who I was and felt like I lost my sister to distance. The closeness that [penpalling] brought was so important to me,” the younger sister recalls.
Growing up with a five-year age difference, the sisters weren’t always tightknit, though a constant in their relationship had been letter-writing, going all the way back to their childhood summers spent at an out-of-state summer camp nestled in Crossville, Tennessee. As a kid, Adeline would always be on the junior side of the camp, while Nolen was across the lake with the senior campers. Away from home, their phones, and each other, their only mode of communication was penpalling, their letters traveling back and forth across the water.
As they moved further along their teenage years, Adeline and Nolen began to find far more similarities than differences between each other; they come from a family of avid readers and writers, so picking up penpalling again as young adults seemed second-nature. “It took a little bit of distance between us to start getting closer,” explains Adeline, who estimates she and her sibling probably have around 100 letters and postcards combined today.
Nolen sees it as a “slow moving, but lasting” means of communicating. Sitting down at the end of the day and reading her sister’s letter has become a meditative process, a sort of diary shared by two. She’ll use postcards as bookmarks, wall decor, and little notes in her car glove compartment. “It’s such a confirmation of love in terms of commitment and work,” she says, explaining how the postal timestamp along an envelope’s upper right corner proves that between the last letter and this one, her little sister has been thinking of her. “It’s as close as you can get to a hug over distance.”
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Texting is instantaneous, flattening both time and distance. With penpalling, the very emphasis is on distance. Even if multiple cities and state lines stand in the way of in-person interaction, writing becomes a surrogate for the writer. For Jordan and Butler, and Nolen and Adeline, it is far from their only means of communication — both duos still regularly text, call, and interact online — but it’s one more way to check up on one another, to share company. It cements their presence in each other’s lives and dissolves boundaries, real and imaginary.
For the sisters, correspondence always returns to their youth spent at summer camp. “Across the lake, we’d only see each other every now and then. Writing letters, in some ways, was the first reaching out for our friendship,” Nolen Bryant reflects. “At the time, it was much easier to write what I liked about you than it was to say to your face,” Adeline Bryant responds, “to even write ‘I love you.’” When spoken language gets all caught up in troubled waters, writing can cast a line across the silent tides and say: I don’t express these things aloud, but that doesn’t mean I don’t feel them. I press my pen to paper and will my words into existence, so in a few weeks’ time, you’ll see.
