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I’ve experienced the most tiring struggle to socialize. The era of the internet doesn’t guarantee interconnections, especially in most social media I use. In the middle of rapid information sharing, I’ve found myself hard to connect with people personally. Of course, people have wholesome content, but those are not enough to make me feel being fairly involved. People use some currencies like being good looking, having many followers, and so, which don’t allow a regular person like me to engage myself in such wholesome connections. Only some people having great popularity and popular content to share enjoy the privilege. I’ve found most social media didn’t value me as a person in some fair ways. But I don’t think that things would get better if I got some adequate social currencies, though. People in social media will acknowledge us as content creators and will rarely see us as a whole person due to the nature of humans facing abundant information. Even we appear to be a shining pearl that doesn’t value much in the pile of treasures. We’re just numbers. That’s it. That’s how I see it.
I decided to use this app after my closest friend suggested me to take social media detox and replace it with other communication means that are more personal. My friend said that Slowly is worth to try. Slowly allows us to reach people across the globe. Things got to be more interesting because here we write letters to penpals just like the good old times. There is no need to haste the reply and bother with the double checklist issue since we all know that writing letters takes time. Letters are eventually replied at a better pace, and we can collect cool stamps, too. Those are what my friend said. I was curious. Making an account won’t hurt and I might delete it later, so I made a bet.
At first, I didn’t have the confidence to text some people, but shortly after I made an account, random people texted me in some simplest yet sincere goodwill to know each other. Even I have to wait for hours, even days, those are worth the wait. Simple questions like what our hobbies are and where we live surprisingly open many possibilities to meet each other from heart to heart. In contrast with my previous experiences in social media, I eventually met awesome people here with great feats I didn’t ever have any chance to get close with: musician from Turkey, Philosophy teacher from Brazil, Human Resource Manager from the Philippines, who offer me valuable lessons and valuable personal connections as well. Not forgetting to mention my penpals who are still struggling with their thesis exam, who are not satisfied with their current job, and some just chose not to disclose their current occasion (which is totally fine), appeared to tell great stories and awesome perspectives as well. This sums up the cool thing in this app: we treat people equally because everyone has their own valuable story to share, and that makes me feel being accepted no matter how bad my life is.
Thank you Slowly for such a wholesome experience! I guess this app will accompany me in my lifetime journey. I hope this app will continue and sustain, giving more opportunities to people to reintroduce themselves to the true power of personal communication through letters between penpals.
Thank you for reading my story, here as a reward, I share with you the pic of the lovebirds gang shared by my penpal. My penpal set those lovebirds on the loose out of their cage; what a lovely scene! It’s one day before Valentine’s Day when I wrote this letter, so I hope you can enjoy the love from the lovebirds too.
