Acts of Power
On writing letters, writing yourself back into order, and reading in front of someone as an act of radical trust.
There is a sacred focus required to pull thoughts from the mind and place them onto paper—to allow them to exist, independent of explanation, outside the writer's body and out in the world. This makes writing an act of courage.
Today, sending a letter is rarely about the transmission of information. Instead, it stands as a testimony of presence: proof that someone sat down, held you in their thoughts, discarded early drafts, and crafted a physical artifact. They offer you their most revealing signature: their handwriting. This script betrays the very pace of thought—the power of a sentence measured by how firmly the pen was pressed to the page, or the sudden dreaminess found in the wide spacing of words, if only you look closely. It is a profoundly intimate artifact, a vessel created with a singular trajectory—to bridge the gap between the writer's hand and the reader's eye.
If writing is an act of attention, a letter is proof that the recipient is worthy of it. It is an exercise in vulnerability, a request to be understood by someone across a distance, even as the version of you who wrote the words slips away. Because a letter travels through space, it also travels through time; it cannot exist in a continuous present. It echoes the wisdom of biblical Hebrew, which acknowledges no true present tense. By the time a word is spoken—or read—it already belongs to the past.
There is also another aspect of writing—one that isn’t shared or created for the goal of reaching a reader’s eyes. This is one of those pieces. Words on paper have a structure, and even a stream of consciousness follows the writer's taste in thought, intelligence, structure, and style. In my case, writing usually happens when I have the urge to put myself in order; it is an act of tidying up, dusting off, and sometimes, even decluttering.
I always carry a notebook and a pen, not for the sole purpose of finding a continuous motivation to create, but out of a continuous need to survive. My little green Moleskine does not represent a permanent need to produce, but rather the temporary, undeniable urgency to survive inside my own head. One could call it internal claustrophobia: the condition that makes my notebook necessary.
The need to structure my thoughts can be so insistent that I might sit across from you and write about you shamelessly, in a language you would not understand, just to make the moment lighter. There is, of course, a slight cruelty in writing about people. To observe someone closely is already to take something from them: you remove a gesture from its natural habitat, lift a sentence from the room in which it was spoken, detach a look from the face that produced it, and place it inside your own system of meaning. Maybe that is why I tend to write about people and my relationship to people on paper. One must decide whether to expose, protect, translate, or distort. Every sentence about another person is a small act of power. The writer can make someone more beautiful than they are, more tragic than they deserve, more coherent than they ever intended to be. This might be the greatest fiction of all.
Maybe writing is also an act of escape, and of coping. Or maybe I am simply leaving a breadcrumb trail of my past selves.
Either way, carrying a pen and paper as a toolkit for survival means you are never truly trapped. You always have a backdoor out of your own mind.
But language is a pendulum, and it always swings back.
Last week, when my mind was spiraling so intensely that I was no longer a trustworthy source to clean my own head—when I was too clumsy to organize the internal turmoil myself—I turned to books. They became my handmaids. They reflected something back to me that I couldn't possibly process within myself in that manic moment.
If writing about you is an act of power, then reading in front of you is its mirror image: an act of radical trust. By opening a book, I am focusing entirely on something outside of myself—a world trusted by the writer to be seen by the reader. I am spending my continuous present in front of your presence, trusting you entirely not to disturb my attention.
Perhaps that is the ultimate resolution between the writer, the reader, and the companion across the table. We alternate between taking power and giving trust, using words to ground ourselves to reality when our own minds threaten to drift away.
But for now, the ink is dry, the moment has passed, and you are still sitting there, completely unaware of the universe I just built out of you.
* Any resemblance to real people, living, silent, emotionally precise, or seated across from the author, is both entirely accidental and absolutely the point.