Writing
Paper, Pens, and 100, Friends I Never Met
Long before the internet, I had a world. It was made of paper.
Growing up, I was a reader. Not the quiet, one-book-a-month kind. The kind that read over 100 books in one summer and still checked out more. The library knew my name. The librarians saved the new Sweet Valley Twins and Sweet Valley High books for me under the counter. I devoured them. Jessica and Elizabeth Wakefield taught me about loyalty and mistakes before I had either.
But the books that marked me were Judy Blume’s. The ones where kids got sick. Where characters battled cancer, faced divorce, bled for the first time. She didn’t lie to us. She didn’t wrap childhood in plastic. She let us see that life could hurt and you could still turn the page. I carried those books like armor.
Reading made me want to write. And write I did. By the time I was a kid, I had over 100 pen friends. 100. From California to Canada, Germany to Ghana. Real letters. Blue airmail envelopes. Stamps I steamed off and saved in a shoebox. I’d sit at the kitchen table and answer five, six letters in one night, my hand cramping, my mother bringing me tea.
That’s how Global Teen Club started. My mother saw me with a pile of international stamps and said, “Why not make this bigger?” So we did. I was just a kid, but we built a network before “network” was a verb. Kids writing kids. Talking about school, faith, music, what it meant to be 12 in Lagos or 14 in London. I’ve been t o school out of the country since then. But I learned more about the world from those letters than I ever did in a classroom. I learned that a girl in Japan and a girl in Jamaica both feared the same things I did: being left out, being misunderstood, losing their mom.
Writing was always something I did as a child, long before the internet, long before blogs, long before “content.” It wasn’t for likes. It wasn’t for a byline. It was because I had something to say and 100. people who would write me back. Writing was how I processed my mother’s lessons about Christ and culture. Writing was how I grieved when she moved to Las Vegas and I felt like I lost the mother who raised me. Writing was how I told the truth when church people wanted me to just “have faith” and stop taking meds.
People who knew me during Global Teen Club know the real me. Very few people do. But the page does. The page always has.
Reading gave me other lives. Writing gave me my own. One summer I read 100 books. This summer, I’m writing one story: mine.
And it’s still therapy. No copay. Just pen, paper, and the same Holy Spirit that sat with me at that kitchen table, watching me seal envelopes to the world.
*cathryn m harris
