This isn’t easy for me to write.
It isn’t easy, but it’s important.
It’s important that I write this because the feelings I have for you are so personal. They’re pseudo-deep and deal with such meaningful and deeply-rooted emotions. Which is why I’m not telling you in person or over the phone or via text or virtually any other communication channel. That’s why I’m writing them and posting them on The Odyssey Online or Thought Catalog, the online forums that serve as a perfect channel for meaningful and personal and deeply-rooted emotions.
And you have these feelings too; we share them. I can tell, because you write open letters too. Just like me. We’re so..the same. We’re so connected. We’re so…relatable. Just like our writing—our open letters.
By writing somewhat informally, you and I, we’re able to connect more fluidly to the reader, really allowing them to feel a connection to us. By keeping our writing incredibly vague, more people can read our shitty letters, think “wow, I also feel that way,” and share them, thereby increasing how much we got paid to write it. Even though it only took us thirteen minutes to write because it’s written at a 4th grade reading level.
Fourth graders have feelings too, you know.
By describing emotions that virtually everyone who has ever existed except maybe Hitler or something has felt, people just seem to get it. And the validation that we often seek by posting online about how we’re such adults because we scheduled our own fucking dentist appointment is able to be obtained elsewhere: on social media, where all validation ought to be received. Because the more people that share what we write, the more people we know feel these feelings too.
But someone needs to do it. Because without us, the world has no voice. Without us, no one can ever articulate these thoughts like we have here, in our open letters. No one has felt their best friend will totally be their best friend forever until we wrote the open letter to our best friend.
No one.
Except the 3.1 million people who shared the article.
I mean the letter.
The open letter.
To someone specific.
Because that’s what they are. They’re letters to specific people.
To my baby sister.
To my best friend from college.
To my high school friends.
I had those things. And you might too.
That’s why I need to write these open letters. And I need to emphasize words throughout, forcing you to read these like a TED Talk speaker who wants to make you think he’s smarter and deeper than he is. And the emphasis and the vague writing style puts up that facade perfectly–we don’t even have to try.
We can even have an upside-down picture on the page and acknowledge that it’s all cliches and still get 27,000 views.
Because like TED Talk speakers we’re spreading wisdom. We’re helping people who might come upon these letters learn life lessons through vague and cliched writing to someone personal in an incredibly impersonal way. The lessons that we include here are lessons virtually no one who is able to read has already heard 1,000 times. Because if you haven’t heard “be yourself,” or “you’re beautiful” yet, I’m sure reading it online will truly pound that life lesson home for you. Remember, you are beautiful insert name here.
In no way should it be understood that the fact that these emotions are being conveyed via open-letters absolutely saps it of all meaning. Because they’re personal. To you. To the reader. And to the 3.1 million others.
Because this is my open letter to you.
The reader of this.
The one reader of this—the specific person to whom I addressed it.
The letter.
The open-letter.
-Me.