Dear Person is a letter writing campaign to connect strangers in a time of passive technological isolation. Enter three words and your email on the home page and I’ll write you a personally-crafted letter.
Dear Blurry Loud Blue,
Did you almost back out before getting your first tattoo?
I’ve been paralyzed to follow through lately.
About you I remember the line-drawn ink sketch on your arm, your overalls, how you were from an island off of Seattle.
The Northwest is an easy and hard place to be sad.
Hard in that the 9 months of overcast will keep you down like a blanket covers you in your depression. Easy because those around probably feel similar—attached and also trapped by the majesty of silver rain falling through the cone-shaped beam of a streetlight, the motherly wrapping of triangle mountains, the blurry green forests that smell pine and wet.
Down here it’s autumn in California and it doesn’t look like it.
I’ve been eating one dark chocolate bar a night to cope with being a sensitive person living in capitalism.
Are your thoughts ever so loud they tune out the planet? Overthinking is a burden that’s colored beige.
I want the feeling of exhaustion dropping down my top eyelid like a windshield wiper all the time.
Do you sleep well? Have you struggled since you graduated college?
Will you keep being an architect?
As a boy I slept with the lights and TV on until a doctor told me I couldn’t. At sleepovers I’d lay in the quiet dark toggling through thoughts about what I should’ve said or shouldn’t, images that scared me, nightmares of what could happen.
It’s not the thoughts that are problematic, but how we react to them—I’ve read this enough times on the internet to know I’m obsessive.
You seemed poised and wise and blue the one evening we hung out.
I hope you keep at whatever it is you are. And give yourself freedom to change your mind.
To be this young can be like building a mountain as we climb it.
I hope you get out of bed when you can.
I hope you know it’s okay to stay in when you can’t.
Be well,
Austin
Dear Person is a letter writing campaign to connect strangers in a time of passive technological isolation. Enter three words and your email on the home page and I’ll write you a personally-crafted letter.