I was almost fifteen.
He was my first love, and we had been together for over a year. Back then relationships never lasted that long. I was convinced that we’d be the one to last forever.
But, alas, that rarely ever happens, does it?
The breakup was messy and cruel. We were on terrible terms. We fired so many reckless words at each other that I lost count of all of our fights and who started them. At the end of the day, it didn’t really matter. Because I was in pain. I still loved him and he left me no space to redeem myself. My feelings felt dismissed and abandoned. Despite the fact that I was dying to confess them.
This is the case with many breakups. Whether they are mutual or one-sided or amicable or absolutely disastrous, there’s always an aftermath. And that aftermath usually includes someone — if not both people — harboring unspoken feelings and words. It’s just the way it goes. You’re used to confiding in your significant other about everything. You’re used to being able to smother them with love. And then one day you lose the ability to do that. And all of those emotions are aimlessly floating, searching for a place to go.
When I was going through my breakup, those emotions were the hardest part. I felt like if I could only get past them, if I could only find a way to tell him how I felt, I’d be fine. It was the silence that was killing me. The guilt. The times I never told him how much he meant to me. The memories I wished I could return to and do all over again, cherish more, love him better. We’ve all been there.
But I couldn’t talk to him because he didn’t want me. At all. He wanted to run away and never look back. And there was nothing I could do to change that.
I used to sit in my bed at night, staring at the ceiling, begging for sleep, my brain racing with thoughts of him. I used to wonder if there would ever be a time when I might be OK again and the wound of losing him may finally heal. If I’d ever find a way to get over him and find peace.
And one day, I finally did. Through one simple thing.
I started writing letters to him that I’d never send
Reading this, you might be thinking, OK, seriously? I opened up this article just to have you tell me THAT? What a waste of time. And who writes a letter without ever sending it? What’s the point?
Bear with me.
I didn’t get the point, either. In fact, in the beginning, I wrote the letters with every intention of sending them to him. I started each one of them with a soft greeting and edited them obsessively and convinced myself that one day maybe I’d be confident enough to send them. To finally communicate how I felt without being overbearing towards him.
Of course, things changed. We got even more distant, stopped talking completely. I realized the letters were doing the opposite thing that I thought they’d do — they weren’t bringing me closer to him and renewing my hope in us, but they were offering me clarity and closure with my own experiences. And that was life-changing.
Why do unsent letters help to get over someone?
I spent a lot of time questioning why these letters helped me so much. The more I continued to do them, the more I understood.
They are low-pressure
If you know you’re never going to send a letter, you know you don’t have to spend hours editing it. Or switching the paragraphs around until it sounds coherent. Or cutting that one sentence because it might not come across the way you intended.
In fact, it’s the opposite. When you know you’re the only person who will ever see that piece of writing, you can cut all the BS. You can do full stream of consciousness. You can swear. You can be rude or you can be nauseatingly cheesy. You can lose the punctuation or type in all caps to show anger. You can act and write however you want and express your feelings however you wish, with no repercussions. That’s the point — you get it all out on paper.
They are private
Unsent letters are private. You won’t send them, so you don’t have to worry about what you choose to share or what seems too personal. You can be as rude as you want or as nauseatingly cheesy and lovey-dovey as you want. You can confess your worst secrets or your most painful regrets. You can admit the times when you sucked as a partner or cling to the moments that your ex refused to rehash.
These letters are for your eyes only, so you can explore any and all feelings and memories that you wish. Just keep shoveling them out of your brain. I promise, it helps.
They can reveal a lot about ourselves
After I wrote my letters, I almost always read them back to myself. It was incredibly illuminating. Rereading what I had written in the letters helped me understand more about myself. It helped reveal the moments of the relationship and breakup that were most painful for me.
It helped me pinpoint my triggers and comprehend why I felt so incredibly lost and heartbroken. It helped me acknowledge the times when I wasn’t my best self in the relationship and when he wasn’t his. It helped me truly see the whole experience for what it was and process it — slowly, and on my own terms, by reading through my own feelings.
They’re cathartic
Unsent letters are just cathartic in general. I had so much to say to that boy that I could’ve left him a thousand twenty-minute voicemails or dropped a million valentines on his doorstep. I wanted us to meet for coffee so I could pour my heart out, but he didn’t want to (and knowing how it all worked out, it’s definitely for the best we didn’t). But these feelings needed to go somewhere, otherwise I felt like I’d explode. So where did I put them?
The letters, of course. I could dump every single thought and mistake and regret and feeling I had into the letters. It was like I was grabbing my thoughts by the handful and splattering them across a page. For once everything didn’t feel so jumbled. I finally felt like it made a little bit of sense. Like my emotions were out in the open somehow. Like the burden was lifted, at least a little.
And the more you write them, the more cathartic it becomes. The less crowded your brain gets. The lighter it feels. The more you heal. Trust me, it’s worth a shot.
So how do you write an unsent letter?
There’s no rulebook, honestly. You just start from scratch and see where you get from there.
You can be like me and write in traditional letter style. I always began with Dear [Name] and went paragraph by paragraph. And, of course, I ended it with Love, Brooklyn.
But you don’t have to do it this way. You could treat it like an extra long text. Or an email. Or just an angry rant. However you feel is valid, and however you want to process those feelings is, too. Unsent letters are meant for your healing; they’re not meant to be regulated or nitpicked. And besides, no one will see it anyway. Have at it.
If there was any important rule to this, though, it would be this: be honest and be uninhibited. Dump all of your feelings and be unapologetic about it. Leave nothing off-limits. It will help.
…
Honestly, breakups are hard. There’s no hard-and-fast rule for what to do when you go through one or how long it definitively takes to get over someone. And certainly, unsent letters aren’t going to magically cure that ache in your heart. But at least they can help you process at a time when you may not have another way to process. Or when your ex has shut you out and you still have so much left to say.
I know that there’s no shortage of breakup advice in the world, and not all of it works. I won’t guarantee that this will work for you. But it helped me — a lot. I think it’s worth sharing. Of course, it wasn’t a cure-all for me. It still took time for me to get better and move on. But it helped. And if there’s a chance it might help someone else, even just one person, then this is worth sharing. We all have to be here for each other and share wisdom. That’s what life is all about.
So if you’re caught up in heartache right now or you just went through a bad breakup or you’re still having trouble getting over someone you lost long ago, I recommend this highly. Whether you’re angry or triggered or confused or relieved or feel like you lost the love of your life, words help. They always do. They can’t reverse all the damage, but they can build a new foundation for you to launch from. You’ll get there.
You will.
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This post was previously published on medium.com.
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Photo credit: Dhaya Eddine Bentaleb on Unsplash