AlmaA is not a platform for noise. It is a sanctuary for what makes us universally, beautifully human. Please read these guidelines before writing your letter.
“AlmaA was built because the world forgot how to be beautiful. Letters to Life exists so that we can remember — together. Not through what divides us, but through what remains when everything else is stripped away.”
The letters we publish are not just writing. They are windows. Into a life someone actually lived. Into a feeling someone could not carry alone. Into a truth that, once said, belongs to everyone who reads it.
That is why we are careful. Not restrictive — careful. Because what we allow shapes what this world becomes. And we intend it to become something worth returning to.
What This Space Is Not For
I
Illegal Content
Letters to Life does not accept content that describes, encourages, facilitates, or provides instruction for any illegal activity, including fraud, harassment, or harm to any person.
II
Self-Harm & Suicide
We do not publish content that romanticises, encourages, or provides instruction relating to self-harm or suicide. Vulnerability is welcome; content that may cause harm to a reader is not.
III
Private Information
Letters may not contain the full name, contact details, or identifiable private information of another person without their explicit, documented consent.
IV
Racial & Ethnic Prejudice
Content premised on racial superiority, inferiority, or ethnic stereotyping is not appropriate for this anthology, regardless of the direction in which it is expressed.
V
Political & Religious Persuasion
AlmaA is not a forum for political debate or religious argument. Letters that advocate for or against any political party, ideology, or faith tradition fall outside the scope of this anthology.
VI
Explicit Sexual Content
Sexually explicit language, imagery, or descriptions are not permitted in Letters to Life, regardless of context or literary intent.
VII
Content Intended to Harm
Letters whose primary purpose is to attack, demean, or publicly humiliate a specific individual, group, or community will not be considered for inclusion.
VIII
Distress Without Reflection
Vulnerability is at the heart of this anthology. However, content that dwells entirely in pain or anger — without any trace of reflection, meaning, or perspective — is not what Letters to Life is for.
IX
Commercial & Promotional Content
This anthology is not an advertising vehicle. Letters that promote a business, product, service, or personal brand are not appropriate for this context.
X
Gender & Sexuality as Advocacy
Letters to Life is not a space for political or ideological campaigning of any kind. Content that frames gender identity or sexual orientation as a cause to argue for or against — in any direction — falls outside the scope of this anthology, in the same way that political and religious advocacy does. We welcome every person; we do not publish arguments.
Why these boundaries exist
AlmaA is not trying to silence any voice. We are choosing, very deliberately, not to be the space where these particular conversations happen — because they already happen everywhere else, and they tend to crowd out everything quieter and more important. We are here for what remains when all of that is stripped away and the only question is: what does it feel like to be a human being, alive, right now?
A note on language
Offensive language, profanity used for shock value, and any terms designed to demean or dehumanise are not consistent with the tone of this anthology. This does not mean your letter must be polished or formal — it means it must be respectful of the reader who will one day hold it.
What We Welcome
These are not the twelve themes to choose from — those live on your submission page. These are the inner qualities we deeply value inside whatever theme you choose. A letter written to a friend can carry grief in it. A letter to a place can hold courage. Weave what resonates into your own story. Tap any card for an example.
I
Grief Woven In
Absence, missing, the strange shape a life takes after a loss. These need not be the subject — they can be the undercurrent beneath any letter you write.
flip for example ↻
Example — grief beneath the surface
“I still buy two coffees sometimes. Not from forgetting — I know exactly where you are. Just because my hands haven’t learned yet what my mind already has.”
The grief is never named. Yet it fills the whole room. Let your loss live in the small, specific act — the reader will feel it without being told what to feel.
II
Becoming Woven In
The quiet turning that no one witnessed. A season that re-shaped who you are. Not the triumph — the middle part. Slip it into any letter where you once were not who you are now.
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Example — becoming threaded through
“That summer I smiled differently. Smaller. Like I had finally learned that not everything deserves my whole face.”
The transformation is never announced. One image — a changed smile — carries an entire season of interior work. Trust the detail to do the explaining for you.
III
Connection Woven In
A bond, a stranger, a version of yourself you left behind. Even a letter to a place can hold the person you loved there. Let connection run beneath the surface.
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Example — connection as undertow
“You never said goodbye in words. You just stopped leaving things at my place. First the charger. Then the jacket. Then I understood.”
The end of a connection is shown through objects, not declarations. What people leave — or stop leaving — says everything love and distance cannot say aloud.
IV
Courage Woven In
Not heroics. The small interior act of bravery nobody saw. The decision made in the dark. Weave it in as the quiet hinge on which your story turns.
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Example — courage as a quiet hinge
“I pressed send and then put the phone face-down. That was the bravest I have ever been. Nobody will ever know that. But I know it.”
Courage lives in the smallest gestures. The reader recognises it because they have done it too — pressed send, knocked on a door, stayed, left — quietly, without applause.
V
Place & Memory Woven In
A kitchen table. A city at a particular hour. Places hold whole lives inside them. Even a letter to a person can be anchored in a specific room, a certain light.
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Example — place as emotional anchor
“The kitchen smelled like burnt toast and orange peel every Sunday. That smell is my entire childhood in one breath. I have never found it again.”
A place does not need to be beautiful to be sacred. Specificity is everything: the burnt toast, the orange peel, the particular day. Vagueness dissolves; detail endures.
VI
Ordinary Beauty Woven In
The moment that almost passed unnoticed. The afternoon that held something extraordinary. Let it arrive inside your letter like light through a crack.
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Example — beauty arriving unannounced
“The bus was late. It was raining. And then, for no reason, a stranger offered me half of their umbrella. I was dry for three minutes. I thought about it for three years.”
Beauty does not announce itself. It arrives in a late bus, a borrowed umbrella, a small act of grace. The writer’s job is to notice and then to refuse to let it go unwitnessed.
VII
Forgiveness Woven In
To yourself or to another. Not an obligation — a choosing. The complicated work of deciding something will no longer carry the same weight it once did.
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Example — forgiveness as a quiet release
“I don’t think about you with anger anymore. I think about you the way I think about weather that already passed. It happened. It shaped things. It’s over.”
Forgiveness is not warmth. Sometimes it is simply weather. Showing its arrival through metaphor — without explaining it — is far more powerful than naming it outright.
VIII
Time Woven In
The years that moved too fast. What you understand now that you did not then. Let the weight of time live in one image, one moment, without surveying a whole life.
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Example — time in a single image
“The photo is seventeen years old. I am laughing at something I no longer remember. That version of me had no idea what was coming. I want to tell her: it will be worth it. I hope that’s true.”
Time becomes real when it lives in a single photograph, a single Tuesday. Root the reader in one moment — the larger weight of years will arrive on its own.
IX
Unanswered Questions Woven In
The things you still do not know. The questions you carry without resolution. A letter does not need to conclude. It only has to be honest about what it holds.
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Example — living inside the question
“I still don’t know if you were good for me. I have been answering that question for six years and I have a different answer every spring.”
Some letters are strongest when they end mid-thought, with no resolution. The reader finishes the sentence in their own life. That is not a weakness. That is the whole point.
How to Write — Examples
Example Opening — Grief — Theme I: To Someone I Lost
“My grandmother's hands smelled like cinnamon for as long as I can remember. It was not until I was standing in a spice shop in Vienna — alone, years after she was gone — that I understood I had been looking for that smell in every city I had ever lived in. I was not homesick. I was grandmother-sick. There is no word for it, and that absence of language is itself a kind of loss.”
Notice: no argument, no conclusion, no lesson. Just the truth of one person's loss — specific enough to feel real, universal enough to feel shared. Begin with a single detail. The smell, the exact hour, the weight of a particular moment. The feeling follows from the particular, not the other way around.
Example Opening — Courage — Theme III: To the Person Who Changed Me
“You were a stranger on a train. You looked up from your book long enough to say something I did not know I needed to hear — not because it was wise, but because someone said it. You were gone before the next stop. I have thought about what you said almost every week since then. I do not know your name. I do not know if you remember. I am writing this because I want to believe that words survive the people who speak them.”
Courage in Letters to Life is rarely about heroics. More often it is about the interior act: the thing you chose quietly, the small movement toward something, the decision no one else knew you made. Write what happened inside you, not only what happened around you.
Example Opening — Becoming — Theme II: To My Younger Self
“There was a year where I stopped recognising myself in photographs. Not because I had changed too much — but because I had changed too little. I had been waiting for something to make me different. I did not understand yet that nothing was coming. That I was the thing that had to move. That becoming does not happen to you. You have to go toward it, even when you cannot see it, even when you are not sure what it is.”
The best becoming-letters are not triumphant. They are honest about the middle part — the not-knowing, the waiting, the first small movement. The reader should feel less alone in their own unfinished becoming. Do not rush to the resolution. Stay in the turning.
Example Opening — Place — Theme IV: To a Place
“There is a street in the old part of the city where I grew up that I have never been able to photograph correctly. The light arrives at an angle that photographs do not understand. I have tried dozens of times. The camera sees a street. I see an entire childhood — the August afternoons, the way time moved differently there, the smell of bread from a bakery that closed before I was old enough to appreciate it. Some places exist only in the body. This is one of them.”
A letter to a place is really a letter to the version of yourself who lived there. The place is the frame. The real subject is always what happened inside you while you were in it. Let the place be specific. Let the feeling be universal.
Example Opening — Time — Theme VI: To My Future Self
“I am writing this from a morning I cannot explain to you yet — you who will read it years from now, with whatever you have learned in the time between. I do not know what you have become. I only know what I am right now: uncertain, trying, afraid in ways I would be embarrassed to name. I am writing this so you remember. Not the person you became. The person you were before you became them. That person mattered too.”
Letters about time work best when they stay inside a specific moment rather than surveying a whole life. Root the reader in a particular hour, a particular uncertainty. The larger feeling emerges from the smaller one.
Example Opening — To Life — Theme IX: To Life
“If I could ask you one thing, it would not be why. I have stopped expecting an answer to why. What I would ask is this: did you know, when you gave me this particular combination of things — this face, this history, this precise capacity for longing — what you were setting in motion? I am not asking to accuse you. I am asking because I am still working out what to do with it. And I think I deserve to know whether the answer is yes, or whether you are also figuring it out as you go.”
A letter to Life is unlike any other theme because there is no person to address, no face to imagine. It is a letter to the force of existence itself — open-ended, rhetorical, sometimes unanswerable. Let it be all of those things. The best version of this letter asks real questions and does not pretend to know the answers.
Voice & Tone
Write This Way
Specific details — the colour, the smell, the exact weight of a moment
Honest emotions, even uncomfortable ones
The particular over the general — this person, this Tuesday
Questions you have not resolved yet
Sentences that breathe — some long, some short, some unfinished
An ending that opens rather than closes
Your own voice, even when it shakes or stumbles
The thing you have never said aloud before
Vulnerability without explanation or apology
The middle of the story, not just the beginning or the end
The one thing that will always weaken a letter
Generic language. Writing that could have been written by anyone, for anyone, about anything. “Life is short.” “Everything happens for a reason.” “Time heals all wounds.” These phrases carry no weight because they have been carried by too many people for too long. Replace them with the specific truth of your own experience. The reader does not need your conclusion. They need your moment.
A Note on Rejected Letters
✉
We don’t reject people — only individual letters.
If your letter is not accepted, we will always tell you which category it was caught by — so it never feels like a mystery. We know how much it costs to write something true, and we will never leave you wondering why.
Where possible, we will also offer a suggested rephrasing — a version of your letter that keeps everything you meant while finding a way to live within this space. If you like it, we can publish that version together. If you don’t, that’s completely fine too: you can take the note, revise it entirely in your own words, and send us the new version whenever you’re ready.
There is no limit to how many times you may resubmit. A letter that wants to exist will find its way.
Ready to write your letter?
You have read the guidelines. You know the kind of place this is. If something inside you has a letter that has been waiting — this is where it belongs.
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