Letter Week

My goal last week was to write a letter to someone every single day of the week – and I actually did it.  Often times I forget that it is important for me to keep my friends and family updated on my life and just to tell them I appreciate them and our relationships. 

When I have problems with friends at school, it is easy to feel like the world is ending or my life is falling apart.  It is one of the weird things about being a college student that I have more than one life.  I have my Drake University life, with dorm friends and class friends and Delta Gamma friends; I have my home/Peoria life, with my family, my sister, my high school friends, and family friends; I have my Camp Tecumseh life, with all of my campers and counselor friends and relationships that I built there last summer, and even during my summers as a camper. 

As a college student with friends of the same age, there’s really only a small group of my friends that I live day-to-day life with.  My friends from camp are scattered at colleges all over, with the majority of them in Indiana, almost eight hours away from me at Drake.  My friends from high school have gone to schools all around the Midwest and some of them staying around Illinois, which is still four hours away from Des Moines. 

I’ve realized that I am really good at missing people.  I can tell someone I miss them and miss hanging out with them, but I never do anything about it.  I’ve realized this week that it really doesn’t take much time at all to write a letter, and it can really make a difference.  By taking fifteen or twenty minutes to sit down and devote time to telling my friends about what’s been going on in my life or sharing stories or wisdom, they can realize that I do really care about them and our relationship.  It’s a little bit more difficult to put in the time to care for long-distance friendships than it is for friends that I see everyday, but those long-distance friendships are just as important as any of my other friendships, and I want to care for them just as much.