GoKawiilThe first time I emailed a stranger, I swear my cursor hovered over Send for a full five minutes.
I had plenty of justifiable reasons to remain hesitant. Not wanting to take up their time, feeling bothersome, worried my question was a silly one... A hundred disparate excuses leading back to the same core: "I’m not enough." That’s the forever curse of low self-esteem. The best and worst-case scenario can never occur, because you’ve rejected yourself first. Who knows how the other is going to respond?
That’s where the rub is, isn’t it? The terrifying unknown.
Yet, despite all the odds, I’ve moved through that suffocating fear. And you can do the same too. Allow me to explain.
Email is old. More established than the smartphone, the hyperlink, and even the beloved internet.
While Tim Berners-Lee was still only theorizing on what would later become the World Wide Web, programmers were already sending each other emails. Ray Tomlinson sent the first email from one computer to another in 1971, choosing the @ symbol to separate the sender from the host machine.
That was 54 years ago. And a few hours previous, as I write this in 2025? I continued what he started.
Email is an oft-cited example for demonstrating Lindy’s law: a theory positing that something’s future life expectancy is in proportion to its current age. The longer something lasts, the longer it’ll continue.
Social media platforms rise and fall like ancient empires sped up a thousand times. Yet email endures. Like the postal service or the printed book. Is it any coincidence these technologies remain my great loves? They share a quality I struggle to name. Perhaps it’s permanence in an ephemeral world. You can tuck a letter in a drawer, discovering it decades later. A book can outlive its author by centuries. One can archive, search, and treasure an email. They’re all vessels that honor my beloved words.
And in their longevity is their flexibility. You can read a book anywhere, anytime. You can send a letter to the farthest-flung corners of the earth imaginable. And you can email anyone.
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