Love Letters

When I was a child, my parents required that we write letters to our grandparents. They insisted on a well written thank you note. And, we exchanged cards on every occasion. Teachers at school also enforced this habit of writing letters or cards for special occasions like Mother’s Day or Father’s Day. Both of my grandparents, my Dad’s mother and my Mom’s father, were prolific letter writers and revered a well written letter from their grandchildren. Hence, I fortunately fell in love with the art of letter writing and became a prolific “love letter” writer. 

It is how the name of my company came to be. “Sincerely Yours” was inspired by the art of being sincere towards one another. We use the word “sincere” when referring to someone who is honest and straightforward.  Someone who comes across genuine and isn’t masked by pretense. The “masked by pretense” seems to be an unintentional yet deliberate action, even admittedly at times within myself. I have an agenda in mind in certain circumstances versus simply showing up and observing and interacting with the circumstances as they unfold. Truly showing up in an honest and open way. I attribute this to the “knowledge economy”. We have so much information available to us that we show up in a “knowing” manner rather than in a curious, honest, and open way. 

A few weeks ago, I had a “nudge” to look for a poem that was written to me by a colleague when I worked at a bookstore as a teenager. This nudge has led me to perseverate on locating something that I seemed to have lost. Upon following through on the “nudge”, I went down to my crawl space and lifted up the five to six large boxes of letters I have kept throughout my life. I sorted through these boxes for weeks looking for the poem, re-reading letters from loved ones of yesterday and today. Through these letters, I was reminded and restored by the words that were shared with me about how I show up to others and how loved and supported I am by so many friends, family, colleagues, and acquaintances. 

About a week or so after sorting through all these letters, I had breakfast with a dear friend and former colleague around Valentine's Day. At the end of breakfast, she handed me a blank card with the instructions to write a love letter to myself. This suggestion of writing a love letter to myself stopped me in my tracks. For years I had honed the craft of telling others how much I loved and appreciated them but being able to be sincere, loving, and nurturing in a letter to myself made me recognize how truly unloving I can be to myself. It was a hard truth for me to realize and see. The validation or love I often seek is from others, never giving it to myself. 

Elizabeth Gilbert, author of “Eat, Pray, Love” has a newsletter called “Letters from Love” with the same intention. To write newsletters that are gentle, loving, and kind. And when she journals, she writes to herself in the same vein. I took this new insight and finally sat down to write myself a love letter. Through all the years of constantly holding myself to sometimes unreasonably high standards and allowing my humble personality to downplay my significance, it was the first step I’ve taken (in a while - or maybe in my life) to truly being gentle, loving, and kind towards myself. So, it seems that for me, the first step to returning to sincerity is to treat myself with sincerity first. 

Perhaps that is when our homes, workplaces, and communities will start to feel less “toxic” is when we can bring sincerity back to ourselves.  I have been reading “A New Earth” by Eckhart Tolle and he often suggests that the external state of the world is a reflection of our inner world. That all the destruction of the environment due to waste and pollution is due to the waste and pollution we have inside. You too should write yourself a love letter when you can. The inner work is where we will find more opportunities to rid ourselves of burnout, anxiety, worry, stress and depression and find more love to bring to the places we work, learn, and grow in.