Last month, my mother who has not been on an airplane in 22 years, (I repeat, 22 years!) came to visit me in Los Angeles.
To be honest, I didn’t know if my mother would ever make it out to see me in LA due to her mental health condition. What we might see as a quick flight from Nashville to LA, could easily feel more like a hurricane taking you under to somebody struggling with their mental health.
But Mom made it!
She stayed for two weeks where I was (and have often been) flabbergasted with her ability to have great mental health in very unlikely circumstances. She was at ease, carefree, adventurous, open-minded, and full of constant joy in California.
I was stunned.
I fully expected her to be triggered, afraid, or upset about something, but none of these emotions ever surfaced. In fact, my mother LOVED Los Angeles. No really, she LOVED it. How could a woman, who has been triggered by a friendly, 50-year-old female waiter serving $20 omelets in Belle Meade, Tennessee, one of the safest neighborhoods in the world, not be triggered during a two-week excursion in one of the most gritty cities, LA?
It was a miracle.
I have watched friends with master’s degrees, working for Fortune 500 companies, fold over in panic attacks, gasping for breath, upon arriving in LA. It’s understandable. In LA, the atrocities of the world are in your face. You pass teenagers sleeping on sidewalks, strangers flicking off each other on the highway, and the amount of patience it takes to find a parking spot is nothing short of overwhelming. But my mother was unfazed. How??
I believe there is only one answer to this.
The letters.
***
When I was a senior in high school, I was so fed-up (and majorly stressed out) with my mother’s vindictive mental health episodes, outbursts in the middle of the night, rants about the government coming for us, and incessant verbally destructive words, I decided to start writing her letters because talking to her got us nowhere.
The next time one of her episodes erupted that resulted in her spewing off the worst profanities you could imagine about everyone you loved most, I decided to start telling her how her words and actions made me feel through a letter.
But I had to be strategic or she might toss my letter away without ever reading it. I knew this could happen because it had happened before. When mom was triggered, she could easily discard or destroy anything in front of her, like the time she dumped all our baking dishes in the dumpster. Not the kitchen trashcan where I could have dug in and saved them. Nope she put them in a trash bag and tossed them in the neighborhood dumpster. Darn government.
***
This memory, along with a slew of others, is how I decided to put my handwritten letter to mom under her pillow, in a place where she couldn’t visibly see it. If things were out of her eye site when she was having a mental health episode, they were safe. It was the things visibly seen, paintings, clothes, artwork, the bakeware, that risked being trashed.
“I wrote you a letter. It’s under your bed.” Then, I grabbed my sneakers to go for a jog. Mom often confessed that she felt bad for having too many emotions. As a result, mom didn’t like to show emotions in front of people, unless they were the emotion of pleasant or agreeable. All the other ones she kept to herself. As for the raging, angry mental health episodes, she had no memory of after they were over. This is why I decided to leave the house, so if she read the letter, she would and could feel her emotions.
When I returned from my jog, Mom was waiting for me in the living room.
“Sarah.”
I froze.
“I read your letter.”
I nodded.
“I didn’t know I made you feel that way.”
Wait, what?
“I’m sorry.”
Sorry!?
I was aghast, lost for words. An apology? A recognition her verbally abusive outbursts had hurt me. She was aware. It was the letter! The handwritten letter had made her aware. That was it. I would continue to write her letters, and I did. I wrote and wrote and wrote. I wrote letters to mom when I went to college. When I lived with her after college. When I moved to LA. Even now, I still write her letters.
***
Pen to paper is a mega-powerful thing because it forces you to be thoughtful and intentional about every word you say. It was through our letters to each other, I learned how to heal, to mend our fractured relationship, and to forgive. It is these decade long letters we have been writing to each other, that I believe helped my mother find the strength within her to hop on that plane and come and visit me in LA.
She wasn’t worried about the vibrant city of LA, the surge in homeless people, or the traffic. She had a different perspective of this city, one that came from the letters. She had heard the inner workings of how this city had shaped me from my work in the mental health world, to stand-up comedy, my deep love for how the sky changed to a warm pinkish color when it set over the mountains, the expansive hiking trails I couldn’t get enough of, surge of creative people I had learned so much from, and of course, the out of this world coffee shops that served more than cow’s milk. They had oat milk out here! She knew LA on a different level, an internal one, as a place that had molded her daughters life, written in the handwritten letters her daughter sent to her.
If you have a loved one with a mental illness, NEVER underestimate the power in writing letters. Below are five scientific-backed reasons of how writing letters can heal the deepest wounds we have with a family member. I can attest these things work because they certainly worked for me!
5 things that happen as a result of writing letters:
1 – Letters foster connection and deepen relationships. (Source.)
Heck yes! It did this for my mother and I. Today we are very close and talk every other day.
2 – Letters provide clarity. (Source.)
We both learned how the other person truly felt, something conversations could never provide.
3 – Writing letters calms our brain. (Source)
1000%. Each time I read a letter from my mother, I feel at peace.
4 – Writing letters strengths our memory. (Source)
Also very true. We recall memories that we didn’t know were still inside of us.
5 -It brings joy to our lives and makes us feel joy toward the person who wrote it. (Source.)
Yes, it does!
