I’m gonna’ sit right down and write myself a letter
And make believe it came from you…
(song by Fred E. Ahlert & Joe Young, 1935)
You know the kind, a letter in which you pour out your heart, one where you tell the potential recipient what you feel, honestly and openly? Many of us have, and it’s probably one of the reasons the song, “I’m Gonna’ Sit Right Down & Write Myself a Letter,” first recorded by Fats Waller in 1935 became a standard of the Great American Songbook . The song has been recorded by more than a few vocalists over the years, including Billy Williams, Frank Sinatra, Nat King Cole, Paul McCartney and Madeline Peyroux.
There’s truth in those lyrics. A letter written to yourself or one you write to another person but never intend to send can make you feel better. Why? Not only does it give you the freedom to express strong or difficult emotions, simply doing so helps to relieve stress, often a culprit in illness and health problems.
Writing, we know, has many health benefits, but the most healing kind of writing is honest, writing that acknowledges your emotions openly. In fact, the ability to feel and name both positive and negative emotions is critical to healing. Sometimes, however, you may be reluctant to write honestly, worried that you’ll feel worse or guilty, especially when what we want really want to say involves admitting feelings about things or others that you’ve never fully expressed.
Psychologist James Pennebaker explained it this way: writing honestly and openly about how you feel can be a bit like the experience of seeing a sad movie. You come out of the theatre feeling bad; maybe you even cried during the film. But you’re wiser. You understand the character’s issues and struggles in a way, perhaps that you didn’t when the movie began. It is in the expression of those feelings of sorrow or anger that you can begin to stand back, re-read and examine what you’ve written. You have a chance to reflect on it and in doing so, understand yourself and the sources of your pain better than you did before. There is relief in that realization–and there is the possibility for insight.
In “Letter, Much Too Late,” Wallace Stegner, Pulitzer Prize winning author, addressed his dead mother. Stegner felt very close to his mother, who always tried to protect him from the cruelty of his father, even though she was rendered helpless in the face of her husband’s abusive personality. While he was a graduate student, his mother died from breast cancer. He nursed her in her final days and sat at her side as she took her last breath. “Letter, Much Too Late” was written fifty-five years after her death. In it, he remembers her, asks for forgiveness and remembers her as a mother with enduring love for her son. He wrote:
“In the more than fifty years I have been writing books and stories, I have tried several times to do you justice, and have never been satisfied with what I did. . . .I am afraid I let your selfish and violent husband, my father, steal the scene from you and push you into the background in the novels as he did in life. Somehow I should have been able to say how strong and resilient you were, what a patient and abiding and bonding force, the softness that proved in the long run stronger than what it seemed to yield to.” (In: Where the Bluebird Sings to the Lemonade Springs, by Wallace Stegner,1992)
Writing, as Stegner’s letter illustrates, offers the opportunity to “think to” another, whether it is yourself, your body, or someone with whom you have unresolved issues. Imagining another and addressing your writing to that person encourages you to write naturally. Even if you never show it or send it to anyone, writing to that imagined other has the effect of making your words more powerfully felt. It gives you the freedom to say what you really want to say. You can even “talk back,” writing to another, your illness or yourself. One of the exercises I’ve used in my writing groups is to invite the members to address their letters to their cancers or their bodies. “What,” I ask, “do you want to say to yourself? Your cancer? Your body?” Here are two responses from former group members:
Cancer: You entered my life without my permission. You tried to turn my body against me, leaving pain and uncertainty in your wake…Because of you I wondered if I would see my children grow up… You made me feel like less of a woman…You took my hair and scarred my body. You made me cringe at my own reflection in the mirror. Others see a warrior. I see someone wounded – broken by the battle…(2013 “Writing Through Cancer” workshop participant)
Cancer, you’re a wuss: Do you know who you’re messing with? Do you know what I did to the last disease that dared enter this body? I don’t think you get it, how wrong you were to choose me of all people. I want to let you know that you may have gotten past my defenses, snuck in through the back door but I have my eye on you now and you aren’t going to get away with anything else…You won’t find me cowering in a corner, sniveling in fear and weighed down with depression…Bring it on, cancer. You won’t win this one. (J., 2014 workshop participant)
Unsent letters are a great way of being able to say what we really want to say. Whether during cancer or at other times in our lives, we all have the need to release the unspoken, to cleanse or reach out to another, whether living or dead, person or thing. An unsent letter can be a tool to help express difficult or complicated feelings that might otherwise not be expressed.
Although I have incorporated the “unsent letter” as a prompt several times in my cancer writing workshops over the years, one participant’s experience with the exercise stands out. She had, the day before our group met, received news her cancer had metastasized and that she had, at best, only a few months left to live. G. used our unsent letter exercise to write to her doctor, who had cared for her throughout thirteen-year cancer journey. After writing, she shared her letter aloud with the group. It was strong and beautifully written, and expressed her feelings clearly. She revealed how hurt she’d felt when her doctor didn’t establish eye contact with her as he conveyed her recent test results. After she’d read, she remarked that she felt better, saying, “It’s helped just to write down what I feel, even if I’m not going to send it to him.” Unlike most times I’ve offered the exercise, however, G. took the letter one step further
The following meeting, G. told the group she decided to read her “unsent” letter aloud to her doctor at her follow-up appointment. She described how visibly moved he became, and how he confessed he had struggled to tell her the news at her previous appointment, not trusting himself to keep his composure as he did conveyed the results. He apologized to G. and thanked her for having the courage to share her letter with him. We were humbled by G.’s courage in sharing her letter with her doctor, but it was an important moment between doctor and patient.
Of course, in this high tech, instant communication world of email, Facebook and Twitter, the “safety net” that writing an unsent letter offers is all but irrelevant. Consider recent jabs, name calling, and racial comments and repercussions that result after an angry or shocking tweet going viral. Even among many leaders, the unsent letter has been judiciously used to cool the anger experienced in the many retorts from critics or opponents. According to journalist Maria Konnikova, in her article, “The Lost Art of the Unsent Angry Letter,”
Whenever Abraham Lincoln felt the urge to tell someone off, he would compose what he called a “hot letter.” He’d pile all of his anger into a note, “put it aside until his emotions cooled down,” Doris Kearns Goodwin once explained on NPR, “and then write: ‘Never sent. Never signed.’ ” Which meant that Gen. George G. Meade, for one, would never hear from his commander in chief that Lincoln blamed him for letting Robert E. Lee escape after Gettysburg.
Lincoln was hardly unique. Among public figures who need to think twice about their choice of words, the unsent angry letter has a venerable tradition. Its purpose is twofold. It serves as a type of emotional catharsis, a way to let it all out without the repercussions of true engagement. And it acts as a strategic catharsis, an exercise in saying what you really think, which Mark Twain (himself a notable non-sender of correspondence) believed provided “unallowable frankness & freedom.”
The beauty of writing an unsent letter is that it allows us to express difficult emotions on paper, safely, and get them out of our minds and bodies. It quiets us, cools us down, and gives us a chance to reflect from what we’ve so furiously written in the wake of strong emotions. In re-reading, we learn from what we’ve written—new insights, greater clarity or understanding, even, as G. was, be able to express ourselves to another with compassion for ourselves and the other person.
Writing Suggestions for This Week:
- This week, try your own hand at writing an unsent letter. You might write to a loved one, a physician, a higher power, your body or even, cancer.
- Write with the assurance that you can say what is honestly in your heart and mind, that no one ever needs to see or hear what you have written.
- What do you really want to say?