The Year I Became Snail Mail Superstar

Introduction

by Sara McNally

(Originally self-published in print and for kindle on January 11, 2020.)

Hi buddies, it’s me, Snail Mail Superstar. You may know me from watching my videos on YouTube or from following the growth of my business, Constellation & Co.* Maybe we went to school together, had a mutual friend, or met at a happy hour that one time. However  you made your way to this book, you probably know this about me: I love snail mail. 

Snail mail, waiting in the mailbox and bearing my name, is tangible proof of another person’s love and affection for me. It’s not instant, and that’s why it matters a little extra. Snail mail takes time and effort. It means someone stopped the grind of daily living to form  thoughts, then words, and write them down with me in mind. An incoming letter means someone spent hard earned money on a card and a postage stamp, and sent their gift to my address. Snail mail demonstrates my worth in the lives of people who know me. It’s not  the only way to exhibit love and indicate value, but it’s a way that means a whole lot to me. 

Snail mail is a beautiful, practical, and portable art form. It is personal and intimate, words chosen just for me, written by hand in a unique script. Snail mail is delivered by hand by a mail carrier with a name, a personality, and a story. The daily arrival of the mail is an  incoming opportunity to build another friendship. My outgoing letters are friendships I’ve sent out into the world, being delivered in the mail. 

Snail mail has connected me to people that complete a circle of  support, helping me stay healthy and whole. Each person, giving in small ways, offers words of kindness and comfort that make a major difference in my life. Snail mail helps me fight the epic battle that is always waging in my mind. Voices of doubt tell me that I’m alone, unloved, and of no value to the world. Snail mail tells me a different story. The cards, letters, and postcards I’ve received are evidence of love that I can point to on dark days. They’re a tangible something that wallpapers the rooms of my mind. They shed light in dark corners and help to drive out my most negative thoughts. Snail mail is something I can collect and keep and  come back to, remembering friends who have gone and days I’d have otherwise forgotten. 

As a kid, I was quiet and shy, more comfortable with elderly family friends than with other children. I was a dreamy-eyed little girl with a lot of imaginary friends. I had a deep and abiding love for Peter Pan, Anne of Green Gables, Nancy Drew, and the works of Charles Dickens. My favorite places to shop were antique stores. The old things made my old soul feel at home.

Over the years, I’ve dabbled at collecting old things: postage stamps, books, Raggedy Anne dolls, over-the-top hats, milk glass vases, paper ephemera, and printing presses. My first tabletop printing press was purchased in Arcadia, Florida when I was in college. Arcadia is a rural area with a historic downtown full of antique stores. I grew up going there a few times a year with my mom and dad. I like thinking about little Sara, quietly browsing the aisles of antique stores, not knowing that someday she’d find and buy something that would set her life off in a brilliant direction.

The phrase “snail mail” itself is a relic. The term is considered a retronym, a word coined to differentiate the old version of something from the new version. The term snail mail first appeared in 1942 in the headline of a newspaper article** about slow mail delivery. Many years before my birth, society saw all the failures of the traditional land post system and looked ahead to a future solution. It brings me a sense of comfort and connection to know that my first snail mail mentor, my grandmother, would perhaps have heard the term snail mail when she was a young woman.

I love snail mail because I love people. I’m also terribly afraid of people. They are unpredictable, and sometimes they don’t like you, no matter what you do. I really need people to like me, but I don’t assume that they will. My brain has been collecting thirty years of evidence that people can be dangerous. I’ve got organized manila folders in the filing cabinet of my brain full of anecdotes, detailing my life’s pain. It’s not a great way to go about the world, and I’m working hard to empty the cabinets and move forward with trust and confidence.

Snail mail is a way that I can connect with people, talk to them, share my heart, and be vulnerable–but at arm’s length. I can spend ten minutes writing a letter to someone, spilling my guts on the page. I can send them everything I’ve ever wanted to say to them, and then  when I put it in the mail, I don’t have to think about how they’ll respond. When they receive my letter, I hope that it makes them feel good. I hope that it makes them happy, and I hope that they will send me beautiful snail mail in return. I hope that the connection will be made. It’s a hopeful endeavor, and it feels safe. Even when people let me down, snail mail never does.

Going to a party or other social event is terrifying, because I might not say exactly the right thing. The most carefully chosen, honest, and true things come through my fountain pen or typewriter onto paper, or through my keyboard onto a screen. When I’m face to face with a person, sometimes I end up saying things that I don’t actually mean, or that I didn’t actually mean to say exactly that way; so I love writing letters because I can edit myself. I can crumple it up and start over if I haven’t expressed myself quite right.

My whole life has been a search for exactly the right thing to say, and exactly the right words to describe what I’m feeling. I’m not there yet. I will probably spend the rest of my life trying to craft exactly the right word, phrase, sentence, paragraph, page, and book. Snail mail is a way that I have found to get those exploratory words out. It’s a method  without too much risk, without too much money, and without too much time. Snail mail makes me feel less alone in the world. All my favorite people and endeavors set out to do things for just that reason: to make people feel less alone. I suppose that’s why I’m trying to be as honest as possible while writing this book, too. I don’t want you to feel alone.

Writing, sending, and receiving letters has always been part of my life. It’s hard to reach back far enough to remember learning these skills and discovering my love for them. From my own recollection and recent research, I believe that my maternal grandmother, Grandma Jean, was my first pen pal. I don’t remember if I loved snail mail right away on its own merits, or because it delivered my grandmother’s unique brand of love and joy to my mailbox. I’m going to guess it was a little bit of both.

I had a childhood pen pal starting when I was about six years old. Her name was Sarah Elizabeth and my name was Sara Elizabeth and we were the same age. That’s about all the coincidences a little girl can handle, so of course we became best friends.

While I didn’t get to see the heyday of the postcard craze or the peak snail mail days, email arrived to the general public in my lifetime. I have very clear memories of the day I got my first email address. I was giddy with anticipation as the dial-up modem bleeped and blooped. I wrote my snail mail pen pal an email for the first time, and then stared at the screen in expectation, waiting for an instant response. It was an exciting day, but the sparkle of email wore off quickly. It’s a necessity of being an adult in the modern era, but it certainly doesn’t excite me anymore. A hand-addressed envelope in my mailbox still does.

I remember painting tiny ladybugs on our family’s mailbox at my childhood home. I’d forgotten about the ladybugs until exactly this moment, and the remembrance of them makes me feel warm inside. My dad called me “Bug” when I was growing up, and my Grandma Jean bought me all kinds of little gifts with ladybugs on them. When I see a ladybug now, climbing a leaf or pausing a flight to take a rest on my arm, I say hello to Grandma. That mailbox witnessed all the early years of my snail mail education. What a blessed relic of my growing up years! I wish I could go back and give it a hug.

My first real love interest was at about twelve years old. We were pen pals, of course, and wrote a pile of letters back and forth about Latin Mass, homeschooling and Pokémon. He broke my heart with a letter. While the ending of our friendship was truly painful for my young heart, I also remember seeing myself as a melancholy character. I felt mature and important in my heartache. I can picture young Sara clutching the offending letter to her bosom and weeping. While I’ve always had a flair for the dramatic, it is unlikely that this actually occurred. Perhaps in the made for TV adaptation of this book, we can get the reenactment crew from those 1990s true crime shows to recreate this little foray into the imagination for me.

I was an only child until my sister, Beth, was born when I was thirteen. For her eleventh birthday, I sent her an elaborate Hogwarts acceptance letter, complete with a somewhat disastrous attempt at a wax seal. I would not attempt another wax seal until the summer I started writing this book, many years later. I’ve improved with age in many aspects, like a fine wine or a weird, stinky cheese.

I was tempted to reprise my role as pretend acceptance letter sender recently when Beth was waiting to hear from the college of her dreams. Unfortunately, the stakes are a little bit higher now that she’s entering adulthood than they were in the years when she was daydreaming about Hogwarts. I wish that giving her everything she wants in life was as easy as learning to conquer wax seals. Knowing Beth, she doesn’t need my help to achieve her dreams or conquer her goals. She’s quite capable on her own and always has been. That fact doesn’t stop my desire to smooth the path ahead of her however I can. I couldn’t feel more protective, but I also couldn’t feel more proud.

In early high school, I passed enough letters to destroy a forest. They were the kind of letters that were written with gel pens, ripped from a spiral notebook, and folded into little footballs to be passed from sweaty hand to sweaty hand. After my first big breakup, I tried to set them on  fire in a trash can in my parents’ kitchen. I realized the error of my ways in time to douse the flames. Sorry, Mom and Dad! At least I didn’t burn down the house.

For a period of time later in high school, I became entrenched in the community of an online message board for a pop-punk band called Relient K. I made dear friends and even a couple of paramours with whom I exchanged many letters. The practical wisdom of the day didn’t look kindly on friendships with strangers, but I found them to be far kinder and safer than most of the people I knew face to face in high school.

One high school boyfriend sent me long missives about our future and how we’d “create beautiful anarchy together,” but he never seemed to like me much in person. In the end, I didn’t even merit a breakup letter. He just ghosted me completely. We didn’t call it “ghosting” in 2003, but you get the idea.

In college, I spent a few months corresponding with a soldier who was at boot camp. We met while vacationing at a dude ranch in Colorado. We became friends while riding horses and camping in the mountains. It was nothing like my real life, and the whole thing  eventually went nowhere, but the sending and receiving of letters was a joy in and of itself.

Through my childhood and young adulthood, opening my family’s mailbox and finding something with my name on it was a highlight of life for my snail mail-obsessed heart. In college, I even had a series of nightmares that I’d forgotten the numeric code to my on-campus mailbox. Receiving the mail is apparently as important to my sleeping brain as it is to my waking brain.

When I see a mailbox, I see a friend. I see something that can connect me to the people I love. I see an entity that can take my words and send them, in reliable snail speed, across the planet. Sure, email and social media are faster, but they’ve got nothing on the magic of  a physical object arriving in my hands from thousands of miles away.

In the United States, the mail collection boxes are blue. In Canada, they’re red. A couple of dear friends took a trip to Europe this year and sent me tons of photographic evidence that in Ireland, the boxes are green. I haven’t done much international travel, but I’d love to find out for myself what mailboxes look like across the globe. Maybe someday.

When I started this writing project, I gave it a code name: Origin Story. All good superhero canons have an origin story that shows who they were before, what made them that way, and how they became who they are now. All the adventures and capers and great things to come in the narrative need the origin story to set the scene. This is Snail Mail Superstar’s origin story.

This is my story, but isn’t just about me. This story is about going back to my beginnings, to the woman who gave me the magic of snail mail. And this story is also about the man who taught her to write letters–the man with all the postcards. It’s also about his father, who brought home a typewriter from the factory to teach his son to write. This story is about how a dreamy-eyed kid who never fit her moment in time wasn’t as much of a misfit as she’d imagined.

This is a story about family and grief and connection and correspondence. It’s about mending the chains that were broken to see the long line of colorful snail mail characters that stretch out behind me. And maybe, just maybe, writing this story will help that long line stretch into the future, too.

As I sit down to write this book, I’m experiencing one of the most insane and transformational years of my life. I would not have endeavored to write a book this year if I knew, when setting out, all the things the year had in store. The element of free time alone is an absurdity. Beyond that, I would not have chosen to write something that people might read in an era of my life that finds me so raw.

I would not have chosen to live through a year with such losses and struggles and triggering of old grief and trauma. I am, however, quite grateful that I’ve had time and a place to untangle the threads of my mind. I’m grateful for consistent access to therapy, and acknowledge the great privilege that access really is. This book would have been something different if this had been a different year. But I think, I know, that this is the  book I needed to write. I can’t tell you all the things I’ve learned without telling you about my year. It may be messy and raw, but it will be true. Let’s begin, shall we?

*Constellation & Co. permanently closed in July 2022. Stay tuned if you want to hear more about this, I’ll be writing on the topic of closing a small business after I’ve finished sharing the chapters of my book.

** “Snail Mail” appeared on page 43 of the April 29, 1942 ed. of the Lowell Sun.

I’ll be sharing a chapter per week. Want to read ahead? The kindle version of my full book is available here.