Dear Joey,

I think starting with your body and how you feel makes a ton of sense. When you feel good physically, it translates to better mental clarity and emotional stability. Cheering you on in this! You deserve to feel confident and strong! I see it as the foundation for everything else.

I’m trying to honor that as well in my life, but I find it super hard to stay consistent. It seems that the minimum I can sustain is really quite minimum. I quickly get to a place where things hurt in a way that affects my quality of life throughout the rest of my day. People give me conflicting advice. From the ‘just push through it’ to ’listen to your body’. I’ve just accepted that people can’t tell what I’m feeling and so I will have to continue to judge for myself and learn from how I respond to things. I’m inspired though from what you wrote to just accept that I can (re)-start in a small way and indeed let it compound.

I noticed you added a letters page with little envelopes! I love it! I like how your envelopes are styled. I got Claude to make mine and didn’t do too much editing beyonnd that. It’s kind of amazing that we can write sentences to a machine now and it’s able to write functioning code in pretty much one go.

I don’t really mind that an app already exists for the letter writing thing. I agree Lettre is quite cute though and I think it pretty much captured the idea I had, with a much clearer ‘pen pal’ system.

But indeed, I prefer writing a letter and publishing it publically like this. It’s at an intersection of things that I find meaningful and interesting. Writing, journaling, connecting with others, and creating a public body of work.

There is a story telling component here as well, Even though this is a personal letter to you, it is also a bit of lore building for myself, and for anyone that might want to know more about me.

Like an optional side-quest or description of an item in a video game that adds to the world and gives it more character.

That’s not to say these letters are a purposefully “crafted” story. Instead it feels like a collaborative creative space, where we have a lot of freedom to apply and discuss things we are learning or interested in, while still “shipping” something intentional.

It’s an opportunity to build a narrative, which I think we’re always doing in our minds anyways, but now we get a chance to do it intentionally and even collaboratively. Should we brand it as co-journaling? Are we onto something here? I’m fairly certain this pattern has emerged in other places many times before across history.

Maybe I’ll look back on this and be able to piece together something that wasn’t clear to me yet at the time.

You’ve journaled a lot right? Looking back on those pages, do you gain any insights about yourself? What have been the benefits of writing / journaling for you?

I had a random thought by the way… I started to wonder what it was like writing actual letters. Like pen and paper and putting it in an envelope and sending it off.

You’d have no personal record of what you wrote. Someone could write you a response, many days or weeks or months later, and unless they reminded you of what you asked you’d be like “what are we talking about again?” Looks like im not the first to think of this.

On that note, I might experiment with cryptographically signing my letters. Similar to the act of sealing an envelope and putting it in the big red mailbox. Once its in there, it’s out of my hands. It’s sent off into the world, and I can’t change it anymore.

These letters though… I could come here and edit this letter in a year, or delete it. And how do you know I actually wrote it? It’s not like you can see my handwriting.

This touches on ideas of impermenance and letting go. Funny how making a choice you can’t go back from… making something permanent also brings aspects of letting go.

There is no real need driving this by the way besides me thinking it’s neat and interesting, and part of the digital craftsmanship topic I am exploring. If I do anything, it’ll be a little detail, a side-quest to a side-quest.