Mr 11 nearly 12 asks me the other day if I knew he was a tweenager? So I got to thinking about what comes with teenagedom. Like turning 13 and being able to have his own Facebook account and the whole concept of Facebook friends. You know those people that you have never met in person but are now friends with on Facebook. Teenagers in particular seem to have them. How do people have 5000 friends (the number at which Facebook cuts off your friends)? Why do people want to have 5000 friends?
Why do people want to be friends with a person they have never met?
That got me thinking. I had two penpals growing up.
One in Malaysia and one in Canada. Both girls about my age.
Two people I had never met, who lived in countries I would most likely never travel to and yet I happily shared my teenage angst and joys of daily life. with them in monthly letters.
Hmmm ….. maybe not so different to a Facebook friend.
Every month or two a letter would arrive in the post box and I would be enthralled before I even opened the letters. Their handwriting was so different to start with. Big and loopy meant Canada and very neat and pointy meant Malaysia. Malaysia used aerograms and Canada white envelopes with a blue trim. And of course the stamps, so foreign.
These were the days before the Internet, YouTube, and Google images. My knowledge about these two countries came from the non – fiction and geography sections at our local library especially the world atlas and Encyclopedia Britannica. So especially treasured were the envelopes that included photographs. Snow from Canada and tropical greenness from Malaysia.
What did teenage girls who had never met each other and from such different worlds talk about? Honestly I have no idea. The international language of teenagers must have transcended borders to sustain a conversation that lasted years.
Then it stopped. High school was coming to an end and we all stood on the edge of that big shiny new world of adulthood and unexplored freedoms. Moving countries as I did I lost much of the ephemera of my childhood and those letters were casualties in the transition between countries and adulthood.
I wonder if their lives look anything like the dreams we wrote about.
I went Googling to see if penpals were still ‘a thing’ in this day and age. What I found is that word ‘penpal’ is still out there but to my mind it is a completely different experience to that of the pre-internet era.
Photos, profiles, multiple accounts, emails – a social media forum that felt a bit like a dating website. Truth is modern penpal world felt a little creepy to me.
Facebook friend or modern day penpal, what’s missing in both those is the hand written letter.
Writing a letter by hand takes time and reflection. The script is uniquely yours, not Arial or Cambria font. No spell check, delete button or standard font size. Perfectly imperfect.
Receiving a hand written letter that you can fold and tuck away in a special place to be treasured and re-read is a rare gift.
When last did you handwrite a letter?
Liska x