Eight years of pen pals

About eight years ago, I revived a very old hobby of mine: writing letters. I used to have a few pen pals when I was a kid in the nineties¹. Back then, my pen pals were in particular another kid who used to come to my parents’ farm back when we had a vacation apartment business. But with the rise of the internet in the 00s, that hobby fell out of fashion and I lost touch with all of my pen pals. I made new friends on the internet and my primary form of long-distance communication became ICQ and the blogosphere.

I was all the more excited to actually rekindle this old passion when one of my friends, 🍄, from my Study Abroad semester in Australia (I was there in 2013) was looking for pen pals and stamp exchanges. I started avidly writing back and forth with her for a few years, until this eventually phased out. However, we revived our pen palship with writing postcards instead of letters to each other in the last couple of years.

I found the whole practice of writing letters so meditative that I soon found a few more pen pals. One of them was another friend from my Study Abroad semester, ✈️, who I started writing with about a year after my first pen pal. Both my Australian pen pals also knew each other and we used to all be part of the UQ Sci-Fi Fantasy Society that met every week.

Is two Australian pen pals enough? Back then, I felt I wanted more pen pals, as I had a great need for this meditative practice at that point in my life. So I went on the postcrossing forums, since I also actively took part in postcrossing during that time. There, I found another pen pal from Canada, 🍁, who I also very actively wrote back and forth with for quite some time. This was my first pen pal in recent years who I know solely from the practice of writing letters, and that’s a very cool and unique way to get to know someone these days. I actually ended up meeting her in real life once, when I visited Canada in 2017, and it was very cool. She stopped writing for a couple of years, and only recently surprised me with a letter, explaining that she was dealing with lots of serious issues in her life that kept her from pursuing this hobby.

Finally, I also started writing letters to one of my long-time friends, 🐌, (who does not live near me, but elsewhere in Germany), and found that writing letters is a fantastic way to stay in touch. I feel in the long term, this really made our friendship better also when we meet or talk in real life. She’s the only pen pal who I actually meet regularly, whereas my other 3 active pen pals are purely pen pals and I haven’t met them since we started writing (with the exception of meeting my Canadian pen pal that one time).

There were a few other attempts at becoming pen pals with a few other people, notably another friend I made in Australia (but who is from England), an online friend from Sweden, and another 2-3 people from the postcrossing forums (from England and Austria), but those all kinda phased out. It was fun while it lasted, but I can 100% understand that this hobby is not for everyone, and you can’t connect with everyone well via this medium.

Today, I would say that I have 4 pen pals. I was curious how this hobby developed over time, and in particular to see how the relationships with my different pen pals fluctuated. So why not visualize it? Conveniently, I started keeping a spreadsheet of the letters that I sent about a year after I began writing with 🍄, because she was really interested in collecting stamps, and I primarily wanted to keep track of the stamps that I used on the letters I sent to her. I ended up also writing down which stationary I used (I love to use fancy, cool stationary and change it up²), as well as a few keywords because I can never remember shit when I try to remember what I wrote in my last letter already.

So I have the data! But I did not actually record the letters I received… which I then took upon myself. I went through my stacks of letters from each of those 4, and wrote the date from the post stamp or the letter itself into my spreadsheet. I should note however, that this data is probably nowhere near complete. I know for a fact that I didn’t catalogue some of the postcards I sent to all of my pen pals when I was on vacation. And sometimes I even forgot that this list exists and don’t catalogue the letters I sent…

Anyway, I decided to plot this data using ggplot2 in R. When plotting each individual received and sent letters, this is the result, with received letters showing in the top half of the chart, and sent in the bottom half. Each color corresponds to one of my pen pals.

While this visualizes individual correspondences very nicely, the peak in this hobby is even more noticeable in the following stacked barplot. It shows the total number of sent and received letters (two columns next to each other) per year on the y axis. In 2017, when I really got hooked on this hobby, I wrote A LOT of letters³.

What we can see is that I went from writing roughly 25 letters in 2017, to an average of about 4-5 in the last couple of years. And I think that’s perfectly OK and I still greatly enjoy giving my pen pals a big life update every couple of months or so. It’s a great hobby, especially in our increasingly digital world, and I wonder if in the next 8 years or so I’ll still be writing letters (or postcards) with these pen pals. And now excuse me, I think I’ll go and write a letter.