yearning for a pen pal

the desire to read and be read

When I first watched You’ve Got Mail for the first time earlier this year, the first thing I took away from it was that I wished I had a pen pal.

For anyone who’s never seen the film, Meg Ryan and Tom Hanks are rival bookstore owners who are unknowingly each other’s email pen pals. It’s essentially an enemies to friends to lovers story, and it’s not half bad.

Instead of finding a way to get my own pen pal, I simply decided to start writing to myself in journal entries that I called “pen pal letters.”

I hadn’t sincerely journaled since 2020, filling up entire notebooks with my thoughts since the pandemic. Still, I thought giving myself time each day to reflect through writing as though I were sending a You’ve Got Mail-esque email was actually really fun.

I mused on what it would be like to actually have Meg Ryan or Tom Hanks as a pen pal via email, dove into the books I was reading, sorted out my thoughts on them, and touched on general happenings in my life that only writing could help me ease my way through. It was some of the most fun I’d had journaling since the pandemic; most of my writing back then was more pop culture-focused as well (looking at you, Harry Styles), and I’m not saying it isn’t now, but I’m more focused on myself and my feelings, centering in on wellness instead of teenage angst. Perhaps that’s what happens when you enter your twenties, but I’ll call it growth nevertheless.

When I got on Substack, I realized that so many creators here were writing posts that were essentially more developed pieces of what I was already writing for myself. I wondered if blogging could really substitute for a pen pal. And so far, I think it can.

I suppose each of my posts could be like a You’ve Got Mail email, addressed to anyone who reads my content. From what I’ve read here and started writing, I think using this site as a journal or diary, with each entry like a letter (or love letter) to anyone, is absolutely fulfilling. I don’t need a pen pal anymore.

That being said, I don’t think anyone on this platform needs to romanticize the idea of writing to be read. Not all of us have a Meg Ryan or Tom Hanks waiting to reply to our posts or essays—and that’s okay. Even if nobody reads my content, I still feel fulfilled as long as I write what I want to write, put out content I genuinely enjoy, or feel proud of. Even if it’s a small poem or a morning drabble, all of my writing is a part of me, and knowing that I’ve put it out there is more than enough for me.

That being said, I hope others who yearn to have their musings on life, literature, and anything they love read by a pen pal as devoted to Meg Ryan as Tom Hanks was in this film enjoy the posts to come on this blog—and enjoyed this one, too.