[WILF] Messages in Bottles & Letting Go
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Welcome to What I Learned From…, a curious little newsletter full of essays, advice, and rabbit holes for writers who want to sharpen their craft without losing their edge. If someone forwarded this because they think you're one of us, they’re probably right. You can subscribe here. Estimated Reading Time: 8 minutes Walked out this morning, I don't believe what I saw What I Learned From …Sending messages in bottles? Yep, people still do it. You’d think it’d be obsolete by now, lost somewhere between disposable phones and waterproof tech. But all over the world, people still tuck messages into bottles and toss them into the sea. Some are scrawled on napkins. Some are carefully folded letters wrapped in plastic. A few are part of science experiments, but most aren’t. They’re notes written by dreamers…the kind of person who needs to send something off into the vast unknown. Just to see what might happen. It’s easy to assume that message-in-a-bottle stories belong to pop songs and Nicholas Sparks adaptations. But the tradition is far older, stranger, and more widespread than we tend to give it credit for. In 310 BCE, Theophrastus, a Greek philosopher and botanist, released sealed bottles into the Mediterranean to test a theory about ocean currents. He suspected the Atlantic fed the Mediterranean, and he was willing to wait years for a bottle to wash ashore as proof. It’s one of the earliest recorded instances of using drift to gather data. Literal curiosity in a bottle. Centuries later, scientists built on that idea. In the 19th and early 20th centuries, oceanographers released thousands of what they called drift bottles. Each one contained a note asking the finder to record the time and location where it landed. Some were recovered within weeks. Others took decades. Just imagine waiting that long for your latest editing review! One, dropped off the coast of Scotland in 1886, wasn’t found until *2018*. That bottle spent 132 years at sea. Cracked and crusted with time, but still legible. Of course, most people who toss bottles into the ocean aren’t looking to chart the Gulf Stream. They’re looking for something a little harder to track. Connection. Hope. A sense of letting go. There are countless stories of bottles sent out with prayers or final messages.
Even when the details are murky, the resonance sticks. (And let’s be real, if you’re going to fabricate a last message, ‘From Titanic. Goodbye all’ is dramatic enough to be believable.) Something personal, small, and vulnerable launched into an unpredictable world... then found. Eventually. That’s the part I keep turning over in my head: It’s not just the act of sending a message into the unknown. Because once you let go of the bottle, it’s no longer yours. You don’t get to choose where it goes or who sees it. You don’t even know if it will survive. It’s like the essay you publish that feels a little too honest. The one you draft, delete, re-write, and finally post at 2 AM when you’re too tired to chicken out. The kind that carries a small piece of you, sealed inside a paragraph. It might be an essay, a post, a line in a newsletter. Something you worked hard to shape into something meaningful. You send it out into the deep blue digital sea. Sometimes it disappears entirely. Sometimes it’s picked up by a stranger who sends a quiet note back. Like the writer who tweeted ‘I feel like I’m screaming into a void’ in 2013, only to have it surface years later as a viral comfort to thousands. Or the newsletter essay that languished for months before one reader forwarded it with the note: ‘This felt like it was written for me. Sometimes, though you may never know it, it lands exactly where it needed to go. That’s the risk and the magic of writing. You don’t always get applause or answers. You don’t always get to track the impact. But if you’re lucky, or if the currents are kind, your words might wash ashore when someone else needs them most. And that, I think, is reason enough to keep writing. Not because you’re guaranteed a response. But because the act of writing itself is a kind of message in a bottle. A way to say “I was here,” even if you’re not sure anyone will ever read it. You write. And maybe, just maybe, something beautiful drifts back. Note: Please don’t actually litter bottles in the ocean. We have Medium and email platforms for that now. Previously in This Writing Life …All the good stuff you were meant to see but probably didn’t.
Thought Threads …For when you want to tug at the edges of your own thinking.
Notes from the Masters …Craft advice that holds up, straight from the ones who lived it. “When we look at something, we decide to fill our entire existence, however briefly, with that very thing. To fill your whole world with a person, if only for a few seconds, is a potent act. And it can be a dangerous one. Sometimes we are not seen enough, and other times we are seen too thoroughly, we can be exposed, seen through, even devoured. Hunters examine their prey obsessively in order to kill it. The line between desire and elimination, to me, can be so small.” — Ocean Vuong, The Paris Review ‘Survival as a Creative Force’ Glossary of The Forgotten …Because life’s too chaotic for bland words. Fidimplicitary [fid-IM-pliss-ih-tair-ee] (adj.) — The act of yeeting your faith into the void and assuming it’ll stick. Born in the 17th century when Latin nerds smashed together fides (“trust”) + implicare (“to involve”). Used by lawyers and philosophers to describe agreements made purely on trust in humans. No contracts, just a handshake and vibes. Sorta synonyms: earnest, wholehearted, trust-falling into the abyss Use it for: Anything where you’re basically whispering “I trust you, universe” before hitting send. ("Using ‘I’ll read it later’ as a filing system for 47 open tabs. Not efficient. Deeply fidimplicitary.") Try This Thing …No promises. Just a potentially brilliant shortcut or two. FutureMe — It’s not sending your message in a bottle to strangers, but this free site lets you send a message to your future self…often surprising the heck out of you when it lands in your inbox weeks or months later. The Final Chuckle …Serious writing deserves unserious endings. Running my first 5K in decades this weekend, but honestly, this sounds way better. ‘Til next time ~ Elisa |