Eyes of Fire | Bucky Barnes

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If Bucky had to summarize and select one thing he learned from Uxolo, it'd be that in communication, there is reassurance. A sort of a primate validation, and we are all seeking it in some way. He wasn't alone in that feeling.

So, when one day she approached him with a pad of paper and a collection of different kinds of pens, he had some idea of what she wanted him to do: write a letter to himself. Apparently she'd been doing it since she was young — it'd started as a little activity that helped her express her frustrations without giving attitude or being otherwise disrespectful) to her family members.

Uxolo sat beside him on the living room couch, muting the already quiet television and twisting to face him. She selected her own pad of paper and pen — a light shade of red, no surprise there — before laying out the rest of the selection on the table in front of them.

Uxolo clicked the pen open and scribbled mindlessly on the edge of her paper, making sure the ink was still usable.

She explained as she did so: by writing to yourself, she'd begun with, you can identify how different you were when he wrote it. Maybe your writing habits, hand-writing, usage of words, ideas and such. You can get used to laughing at yourself; you'll be all nostalgic & amused with you taking time out of your life, to write to yourself. You'll probably make yourself smile. All of your quirks and thought patterns will show up as plain as day. You take one step closer toward understanding exactly what is is that makes you authentically YOU.

Being any amount of time apart from yourself, you'll be way closer to your yester-self than ever.

Writing letters to yourself can help reorient your perspective, especially when you express gratitude for the small joys that happened that day. One goal was to break out of the worried mindset that set the already grey days of late fall in shades of emotional monochrome. Having to write down the good things causes you to slow down each evening and acknowledge that, even amid the worries, there were moments of joy.

By addressing them to someone else to create a conversational spirit, you can step back a little from yourself. The things you write down, then, would often be less emotionally involved than your swirling thoughts. Writing letters allows you to be reflective, to observe the day's events from a slightly removed perspective. The letters can acknowledge fatigue, worry, and struggle but can also challenge you to hold both the difficult and the good together; a season, and even a couple years, of struggle does not cancel out the lovely moments of each day. This practice of turning toward the good in writing can help you develop a habit in which you are more easily able to express gratitude.

Reflection can lead you to create new goals or make plans to make your life even better. All the self-reflection and thoughts about where your life has been can also be a great way to think about where you would like your narrative to go. Reflection can also lead to new insights and discoveries about yourself. Finding just the right words to describe yourself and your experiences can cause you to look at yourself from a different perspective. Even looking at what happened to you just yesterday can uncover important moments you did not realize were important at the time. We don't always realize the significance of things until we're out of the moment.

You can begin to associate letters with positive feelings—delight, comfort, rest, the feeling of curling up with a cup of tea to read someone's words addressed to you. You might enjoy choosing a specific card, coming up with a poetic line or two to summarize my day, and simply writing down a few things that I was thankful for that day.