You’ve been given the ultimate gift – a capacity to speak and think in words and notions and to express yourself by using the skeleton key of language. It’s an interface by which you allow others into your world. There are things that are just preverbal, meta verbal or completely inexpressible, there is always this vacant place of things that can never be conveyed in language, rouge parts of private emotion and experiences outside the scope of the magic trick of speaking yourself into being, but you can sure as hell try to speak your most honest truth.

There are weights we carry inside, things never said and processed just sitting there, staring at you and waiting for you to figure it out, let go, incorporate, honor them. Write a letter to anyone that had an impact on your life – write it out of love, out of sorrow, as a means of forgiveness and acceptance, as atonement, explanation, an ode, epitaph… You may not be good at writing – that’s irrelevant, you’re not going for the Pulitzer here, just trying to speak your mind and heart the best you know how. Most of the times it will feel like it is lacking something in the first draft, like you didn’t say it all… and you probably didn’t but 70% of closure is 70% better than none at all. You can’t move forward if you’re stuck ogling the rearview mirror and your future needs you more than your past does, so it is time to let some things rest. Grab a pen, a laptop a typewriter and just get going. Hemingway said: “There is nothing to writing. All you do is sit down at a typewriter and bleed.” and this is actually the catch. It doesn’t have to be perfect, just true and yours. You may decide to hand in this letter or not, to burn it or keep it because the person is no longer living or is unreachable – write it anyway.

What happens when you write is the unburdening and alignment. All of the bottled up unsorted emotions finally get an outlet and as you put pen to paper and move through the narrative you not only release things but actually make them more clear to yourself. You slow down your breathing, slow down your thinking and, just as this line on a paper, your thoughts become linear and focused. While speaking we’re mostly in the operative pragmatic mode, but when we sit down to write the scattered attention becomes a laser beam. It’s self-therapeutic. The more you write the more clear things become, and clarity is precious – one of the most precious assets you’ll have. Write! It doesn’t have to be letters even, it can be mediations on any topic at all, about everything and anything you find valuable. No one ever has to see it, just write.