I woke up too early on June 17th, 2014, the way you do the morning after a grief-striking breakup does its thing and leaves you too sad to sleep in. I was 17 and had just suffered my first real, life-changing, blindsiding heartbreak and had found the experience, in a word, eviscerating.

Not knowing what to do with myself, I did the only thing I’ve ever actually known how to do: write. Specifically, I wrote a letter to the boy who had very coolly informed me that my services as his girlfriend were no longer required on the phone the night before.

Then I tore out the sheets of notebook paper on which I’d scrawled this teenage missive, took photos of each page for posterity, and slipped it into an envelope addressed to his much-nicer-than-my-house home—where he was probably sleeping soundly in an air-conditioned bedroom. For a bit of added flair, I tossed in the broken necklace he’d given me for my birthday—which I’d ripped off my neck in histrionic fashion and flung across the room the night before—and sealed it all up.

And then, instead of ripping it to shreds or burning it or casting it into the ocean in some kind of cathartic cleansing ritual, I sent it. Actually, first I let it sit on my bookshelf for a month I waited to make sure he was never coming back. But then I drove to the post office, took a breath, dropped it in the mailbox, and felt something resembling relief for the first time in weeks..

Truthfully, it took years before I actually “got over” that breakup, and I’m sure there are qualified mental health professionals out there who would probably suggest I never did. But writing and sending the letter did help me create some kind of closure for myself that this world and that boy weren’t going to give me. Not only did it allow me to have some semblance of a last word, to take some kind of action in a situation that had otherwise rendered me powerless, but the act of physically dropping that letter into the mailbox had a satisfying kind of finality to it. It’s done now. You don’t have to heal, but you have to move the hell on.

In the decade since, I’ve sent what I’ve taken to calling “post-breakup letters” after each of my significant heartbreaks. There’s a lot you can do with a letter that you can’t do with other kinds of post-split messages like an ill-advised 3 a.m. “I miss you” text. First of all, it gives you the time and space to process and express the many complicated feelings that tend to devolve into anger or tears or silence in the heat of the moment when most relationships meet their demise. Moreover, the finality of mailing a physical letter also has the potential to provide the kind of closure we often seek and usually fail to find when we inevitably reach back out to an ex via text or drunk dial them from the bathroom floor of the bar.

It’s also a bit of an emotionally safer option in that, unlike a call or a text message, a physical, mailed letter doesn’t really demand a response, so it enables you to reach out and say the things you need to say without the heartbreak-compounding risk of getting left on read or sent to voicemail, all while remaining (at least somewhat) respectful of your ex’s time and space. A hand-written letter isn’t going to pop up on someone’s phone while they’re just trying to answer a work email or watch Netflix on the treadmill.

Not to mention, both the physical nature of a letter and the deeply unhinged act of actually sending one in this, the age of technology, have a way of leaving a lasting mark. I have no way of knowing what these exes have actually done with my letters. Still, I can’t help but find some self-indulgent peace in having seized the last word and delivered it in such dramatic fashion.