Dispatches from emotional vulnerability
Published on 2025-10-31
Dear reader:
Hello reader.
Many years ago now I had a friend who told me she really liked receiving handwritten letters. In my best effort to be a good friend in a way that's intelligible to the people I care about, I sat down and wrote her a letter. It was incredibly uncomfortable. I've spent most of my life at this point writing on a keyboard; I hadn't needed to seriously write Words on Paper since I was in elementary school. I'm not even sure what I told her anymore; it was so long ago now. Something about how she was a good friend, presumably. She seemed to appreciate it at the time.
More than anything, I (re)learned something about myself in the process: I have a much easier time writing about how I feel than talking about it. There's a a few reasons why I think that's the case. One of the less-discussed side effects of testosterone is the way it makes you feel less… Less in general. But obviously it's more complicated than that. Social life can't be reduced to chemistry. People like me—and I do believe there's others like me—might tell you there's something about this world that makes it really hard. Call it inauthenticity, alienation, escapism, or whatever; there seems to be something keeping us apart. At least, that's how I've always felt, and I got pretty good at playing the game.
At some point it hit me that if I didn't want to spend the rest of my life pretending to feel nothing, I was going to need to relearn how to be emotionally vulnerable with people, and it was going to take a lot more than cyproterone acetate. So, I decided to start practicing in the only way I knew how: by writing people letters.
I started with my friends from high school. Then, after a while, I started writing my friends from university.¹ That was a lot more intimidating because while I only see my high school friends once a year, if I write a letter to the person I met in soil science I'm going to have to see them again next Tuesday. There's stakes! But that's what matters, isn't it? Emotional vulnerability necessarily entails an amount of risk-taking.
I met a girl a few years ago. I never really got to know her; she only stuck around for a few months before moving away. But while I knew her she said something that I still think about quite often; that frames the way I think about emotional vulnerability to this day: she said that if your relationship cannot survive an honest admission of your feelings, then it's probably not a relationship worth keeping.² I'm pretty sure at the time she was talking about romantic feelings, but I think the same could be said about friendships too.
There's a lot of things people seem to want out of their relationships that they themselves are unwilling to give: initiative, intention, space… space for quiet, for hardship, for honest admissions of the feelings we typically keep to ourselves. I've always found in queer relationships we tend to be more open about the fact that these are things we want, but they're still hard to come by. And I think rather than be upset about it, it's a lot more productive to take it as a "you" problem and actively work to create an environment in which people know they can be safe, let their guard down, and be emotionally vulnerable. Someone always has to make the first move.
Pathways to emotional vulnerability
Okay, so if you're seeing yourself in all this, here's something actionable you can do right now: Think of a person you care about. It doesn't have to be someone you love love. It could be someone you love "as a friend," with whom you'd never use a word as strong as "love." Got someone in mind? Great. Now grab a pen and a piece of paper. Think about how that person positively impacts your life. Tell them about it. Tell them something about yourself, too: something you've never told them before. Tell them how much they matter to you. And once you've done that, put it in an envelope and hand it to them the next time you see each other. Once you've done that, leave it be. It's out of your hands now.
I've done this a number of times over the last few years. I'm writing this article now because I think I have something to say about it. In short, I think I'm done. I don't think it's something I'm going to do anymore—at least, not the way I used to.
Why specifically is a bit harder to explain. Basically since I first started writing letters I had this sense that what I was doing was somehow selfish. At the time I pushed those feelings to the side, figuring they probably had more to do with my own insecurity than what any real person would think of me. And maybe I was right for it, but having done it many times I can't say that feeling has ever gone away. There are definitely people who want this. There's people for whom receiving a handwritten letter is one of the most personally meaningful things you could do for them (I am one of those people³). But without that—if you don't know that about someone, then sending them a letter feels kind of one-sided.
Real, healthy relationships are based on reciprocity. A healthy relationship that makes space for emotional vulnerability would do so in a way that's reciprocal. It's entirely possible for you to be emotionally vulnerable with someone. It might feel hard, and getting to a point where it feels easy might take a lot of individual work, but the truth is there are concrete things you can do right now to put yourself in a position of emotional vulnerability. Building a relationship on a foundation of emotional vulnerability is a lot harder. it takes mutual trust, mutual cooperation, and more than anything, a mutual intention. None of those are things you can do on your own. There does still need to be a first mover—someone who makes it clear that they're a safe person to be around, but you don't need to write a letter to do that. Writing a letter might not even be the best way to do it.
At some point during this story I shifted my focus away from writing letters to individual people and started publishing my writing on the internet. As much as I like to act like my website and gemlog are an honest reflection of who I am, and as much as I try to make it so, I'd be lying if I said there wasn't anything I felt uncomfortable publishing online. I think that's pretty normal, and that's also an inherent limitation of a broadcast medium. If I'm writing a letter to the rhetorical person I met in soil science, that's an audience of one who, at this point, I'm pretty comfortable being emotionally vulnerable with. When I'm writing online as myself, I don't know who you are, and I don't know what you'll do with the knowledge that I've written lots of awkward letters to the people I care about. It's the ultimate exercise in emotional vulnerability.
And not only that, the nice thing about writing on the internet is that the boundaries and intent are clear. I'm writing this because I have something to share. You're reading it, voluntarily, because you think what I have to say is worth your time. At the end of every page, you are explicitly encouraged to contact me if you have thoughts you'd like to share in turn. If not, you can forget this ever happened. That's the exchange, and it's something that works well for me.
So yeah. I don't regret doing it; I learned a lot in the process, but I'm not sure if writing people letters is something that still makes sense in the context of my life. At least, not in the way I used to. I do hope I can find more people who are explicitly interested in letter writing, though. Not just because there are things I'd love to write about that I can't reasonably say on the internet, but also because it's a kind of relationship that isn't really afforded by modern social reality. Something I'd hate to lose.
Footnotes
¹ If that's you, hello. I know some of the people in my life read the stuff I write on my blog. This is a weird and rare case where the stuff I'm writing online is intended for an audience of people I've met online—not necessarily everyone. Usually I try to write for everyone explicitly in view of developing more of a willingness to be emotionally vulnerable—trying not to be an imaginary version of myself that can only exist within a specific context, or to actually embody the version of myself that I want to be.
I share a name with a real person
So I'm not really sure what you should make of this, if anything at all. Maybe just understand that this isn't targeted at you. This isn't really about anyone except myself.
² If you're 21 and your friends aren't talking about:
- Emotional intelligence
- Honest admissions of feelings
- Maturity
- Healthy interpersonal boundaries
Then it's time to find new friends. Your network is your net worth.
³ Feel free to take notes.
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