Epistolary ‘Mediums’ of Mindfulness: An Interview with Letters to Strangers

Epistolary ‘Mediums’ of Mindfulness: An Interview with Letters to Strangers

Letters to Strangers (L2S) is a global youth-run non-profit seeking to destigmatize mental illness and increase access to affordable, quality treatment for youth aged 13 to 24. Through this platform, young people with no access to an emotional outlet can share their stories and feelings through a nameless letter, which will be exchanged with that of a complete stranger (through email) and appropriately responded to. The strangers are paired with each other carefully based on answers to certain questions in the sign-up form1 .

On September 30th, 2021, through the Google Meets platform, students of Manipal Centre for Humanities, Aatreyee Ghosal, Manjita Joshi, and Serene George interviewed Aarushi Kataria (Founder) and Nayomi Dave (Vice President) of L2S India.

I: How do you see letter-writing as a medium of communication changing?

A: A lot of times people don’t know what to say. So, we send some guiding questions that people can use to start the conversations, because sometimes you don’t really have something to say, you just want to listen, but you also want to talk so you’re waiting for the other person to send their letter and maybe say the same thing in response. Generally, we noticed that a lot of people actually relied on these questions to frame these letters.

During the pandemic we saw lesser and lesser people actually rely on these prompts. There are things that people want to talk about. Even if it’s the first letter, people are a lot more open to having deep conversations that are not fluff as we would call them, right from the beginning. I think in that way, the quantum by which people are opening up is a lot more. And I think that is a significant change.

To give you an example right from this month, our theme this month was: the ways we say goodbye. The question was that, in many languages there isn’t just one way to say goodbye. In French, for example, you have something that means ‘see you soon,’ while you also have something that means ‘farewell.’ In Japanese, ‘Sayonara’ carries with it a tinge of permanence and loss; a goodbye that means, ‘maybe I won’t see you again, and I don’t know when I should see you again.’ All of these show up on Google Translate as ‘goodbye,’ so maybe goodbye is not so simple, maybe different goodbyes leave different things unsaid. How are some ways that you have said goodbye in your life that also defy simple definitions? If you had to create a glossary for your own goodbyes, what would it look like? A supplementary question to this was, sometimes you have to say goodbye to certain people, things, feelings, places, memories that we wish with every ounce of our beings we didn’t have to leave behind. In a sense, goodbye becomes an oxymoron. What happens when there’s nothing good about the bye? What can we do or say in the after that makes things a little easier, or at least a little bit less impossible? And what do you do?

This was largely because of the fact that the second wave in India had just passed over, and almost everyone had lost someone, or something, and we wanted people to possibly have a conversation with their feelings. We wanted them to process the grief that could have happened. A lot of times, it doesn’t strike us till we are asked to talk about it, just how deeply something’s affected you.

This was also a time when there were a lot of political upheavals starting up again, which meant that a lot more communities were

being systematically discriminated against. There was violence happening. We wanted people to remember that there is someone willing to listen to you, that your stories matter and that we’re here for that. We’re here to ensure that there is at least one more person who listens to your story, who shares your grief with you and who identifies and sees you for everything that you are.

I: L2S works in an interesting space that blends the private and public. What does it mean for your organisation to be part of an initiative that deals with the personal, intimate medium of letters? What has L2S achieved in this context?

A: I think most overwhelmingly, we feel a sense of gratitude that people actually trust us. These are stories you possibly wouldn’t tell someone that you’ve known for years. They’re trusting absolute strangers with these. They’re trusting that this will not be misused. They’re trusting the process, so to speak. They’re using this as a way of healing and we’re a part of that journey for them, and more than anything, I think that is what makes the work that we do every single day so important to us. That there is something we are doing that is helping someone out there, and that’s what makes it important.

Letters, as a medium of exchange…years later when you read letters that Kafka wrote to Milena, you read letters that Miller wrote to his lovers; you read so many of these letters and there’s always that idea that there’s something romantic in those letters. There’s this idea that the most famous letters are…love letters.