I’ve seen a lot of “open letters” recently on sites like Odyssey. Open letters to best friends, best high school teachers, dads, cousins, priests, everything. They seem designed to be so open and general that they are applicable to everyone. My experience of the best high school teacher I ever had is meant to overlap with yours, even though they likely were not even slightly similar. I see these and feel the message they exude: be supportive. Tell me why everything I’ve done is great, and let’s fill the world with happy feelings and determination. But is there really such a thing as an “open letter?” Something so general, based on something so precise and specific?

Well, no, of course not. But in keeping with this tradition of open letters that don’t differentiate anything from anything else, I would like to take on the task of writing an open letter to people who write open letters.

Dear People That Write Open Letters,

Wow, you really have written a lot of "open letters." Your experiences sure have been fun to read about. Like the time you failed a test in high school and your teacher told you it was OK. You learned a lesson: it is OK to fail. It is OK as long as you did your best and you can recognize that you were wrong. I’m glad you got to learn that lesson, but now you’re trying to tell me that I ought to learn the same lesson from your experience. But that’s your experience, not mine.

Or what about the time you lost the big sports game, and the coach told you that it was OK, because you tried your hardest? Yes, it would have been better if you had won, but failure teaches one a valuable lesson. And even though you thought you’d never have to learn it, you did. That was your experience, but it was also your experience generalized. That’s my focus word here, generalized.

That’s why I don’t like all of your open letters. There’s something about them that seeks to take a precise experience and convert it into something that is so accessible that anyone can understand it. No lesson is too deep, complex or ingrained in the situation for me to understand. You want me to understand. You need me to understand you in order to succeed in your goal of bridging our understandings and experiences. But you skip over that crucial step of dissonance, and the specific. I was not in the same state of mind as you at the time, and that’s why we are different.

We need to be different, and at least slightly unintelligible to each other; universality reached by the erasure of what is not universal doesn’t really seem to be anything worth reaching anymore.

Sincerely,

Drew Sasala