Ronda Beaman Offers Some Tips For Expressing Our Most Intimate Thoughts on Paper
For years, I believed people avoided letter writing because they lacked time. But after teaching leadership, communication, and storytelling to thousands of students, I’ve come to believe something else entirely: People do not avoid writing because they’re busy, or even because they have nothing to say. They avoid writing because they know, deep down, that the letter may be saved, may be re-read, even answered. A text can disappear into a scroll. An email can be deleted in a swipe. But a letter—especially a handwritten one—feels dangerously permanent. It asks us to choose what deserves to outlive us.
I have become less a writer and more a letter doula: someone who helps usher difficult truths, buried gratitude, overdue apologies, impossible love, and unfinished grief safely into the world. When my students struggle to write speeches, they often believe the problem is craft. They ask questions about structure, transitions, hooks, and conclusions. But usually the real problem sits somewhere deeper. We live in an age of performance writing. We curate ourselves constantly. Even our vulnerability now arrives edited, filtered, captioned, and optimized for engagement. We have become remarkably skilled at sounding like people who feel deeply while revealing almost nothing.
