Why I Started Writing Letters to Myself While Traveling.
In the first year after I graduated from university, I really delved into the idea of freedom. Anyone who has had a long-term full-time commitment knows the stifling responsibility of stagnation, especially if you also feel a yearning to explore the world. So, for the first time in my life, I felt I could actually say yes to that dream and go wherever I wanted. That’s how I found myself in Ireland for my 23rd birthday, sitting in a pub that was over 200 years old listening to live folk music, wishing I had a pen and paper to write down all the little things I was noticing about this microcosm of a moment I was getting to be a part of. I had a realization that my mind alone was not a reliable archive of my experiences, and it suddenly felt urgent that I start recording my experiences with a sense of intention and detail that I had never experienced before.
In hand with this reflection was a greater realization I had been coming to terms with that whole first year post-graduation. I was having to get past the childhood idea that travel would always be a once-in-a-lifetime experience for me. In my upbringing, I never saw myself as someone who would have the privilege to see much of the world, let alone get to revisit and become familiar with these amazing and foreign places of the world. But sitting in this old pub trying to sip through my first-ever Guinness, I finally understood that I can decide that travel isn’t going to be an occasional experience for me. It was going to be a major, ongoing part of my life that meant that each recorded experience would serve to be built upon by the new memories I would create and the deeper understanding of the world I know now is possible to cultivate. It was a pivotal temporal shift that allowed me to rediscover writing outside of my formal education.
For most of my young life, education had been my primary focus, and without realizing it, it had become the main textual outlet for my experiences and view of the world around me. Especially as a student committed to the societal and anthropological studies of the world. But, after 16 years of non-stop being in school, I finally graduated, and suddenly the routine and the driving force of my life had to drastically change.
No longer was I always planning for the next essay or interesting topic to research, and with that went away my purpose for writing. Yet, I eased into a feeling that something was missing because the desire to write, research, and expand didn’t disappear. In school, I was easily fulfilling this desire without even realizing it because I was always writing about experiences, perspectives and exploration with intention. Just using an academic framework to make sense of what I was seeing and living. Writing was the outlet I didn’t know I needed until it was gone. Without it, the natural mode of analyzing and recording with intention, like an anthropologist should, began to fade. But writing letters and recording my experiences as a traveller like they were my personal fieldnotes became that new outlet.
As I dove back into the practice of personal writing, a discipline I had been drawn to and struggled with as a young child, I had to come to terms with how my writing wasn’t ever going to work as just a journal. Part of this is the struggle of physically writing. Honestly, I never liked it. Being left-handed, my handwriting always looked bad, and it’s always uncomfortable to write in a journal. It just never lived up to the image in my head. Now, I’ve fallen into a balance of digital and physical memory keeping. This way I can express my memories with visual creativity through scrapbooking and junk journaling, while writing has become a digital practice to live up to the academic intentionality from my background in anthropology, with an embedded flow of aesthetic and organizational structure that makes it feel worth doing. This format works for me, in how I write and how I think.
Thus, the digital platform of the Letters To Somewhere travel journal app started as a personal pursuit in the same way that people design and create their own leather journals for note-taking. It was a way of creating the perfect place for my own fieldnotes and travel stories at first, but as I added more features that built upon my desire to record my experiences, like the digital migration passport or the global map that every destination is pinned to, I realized my own records would have even more meaning if they were connected and interwoven with the stories and travels of all of my friends and family. And more than that, it could be shared with all the other intentional and slow travellers of the world as a form of rich cultural exchange and community development. So if you are someone like me who feels the urge to move through the world intentionally and aspire to produce something meaningful and lasting from your unique experiences. Or you just want a way to create your own personal letters that preserve your travel stories, I am building something that may be helpful for you.
The letters To Somewhere app is the digital platform I wish existed on that trip to Ireland. A place to write the way I used to write in university with a touch more creativity and intention. A place with structure, but without the pressure of the perfect page. It’s where I am preserving the long version of every story, in the moment, before the details start to fade.
If you’d like to try it, you can find it here.
And if you’re not ready for that yet, or you’d just like to see what intentional slow travel actually looks like in practice, maybe join the community of travellers who are asking the same kinds of questions I am. Not focused on itineraries and highlight reels. Just the honest version of what it means to move through the world slowly and on purpose.
