The 3 AM Voice Notes and the Handwritten Letters: How I Actually Read Your Messages

Last spring, my team and I did an audit — an actual, spreadsheet-level audit — of how many messages come my way in a single week. DMs, comments, voice notes, tagged posts, physical letters forwarded from my P.O. box. The number was somewhere north of forty thousand.

Forty. Thousand.

I want to be honest with you about what that feels like, because I think a lot of you assume public figures either read everything or read nothing. The truth is messier, and I've spent years building a system that lets me stay genuinely connected without drowning. So here it is — what I keep, what I answer, and the messages that live in my head rent-free forever.

The Handwritten Letters Get Read First, Always

There's something about someone putting pen to paper in 2025 that demands respect. Every physical letter gets read — by me, not an assistant — usually on Sunday mornings with coffee. I call it mail church.

Some of these letters have rearranged my life. A woman in Ohio wrote to me two years ago about starting over at fifty after her divorce, saying my videos were the only thing that made her feel less alone during it. I cried. I wrote back. We still correspond. I have a drawer of letters I'll never throw away, and I mean that literally — there's a drawer.

The Voice Notes Are a Different Beast

Voice notes are where things get complicated. Someone sends a ninety-second message at 3 AM, voice cracking, telling me something they've never told anyone. And I hear it. I really hear it.

Here's my rule: I listen to every voice note longer than a minute, because those are the ones where someone worked up the courage. But I can't reply to all of them, and I've had to make peace with that. What I can do is respond to a handful each week and, when a message raises something serious — and some do — flag it to my team so it reaches people better equipped than me to help.

I'm not a crisis line. Pretending otherwise would be dishonest and, honestly, dangerous. But I can be a person who listens, and that matters too.

What I Answer (and What I Can't)

My honest breakdown:

• Comments on the day I post: I camp out for about an hour and reply to as many as I can. It's chaos and I love it.
• DMs: My team triages, and anything from longtime community members gets surfaced to me. I answer maybe one in fifty, but they're real answers, not copy-paste.
• The rest: I read in batches. I can't reply, but I see you. I promise I see you.

The guilt of not answering everyone used to eat me alive. Then someone in my comments said something that reframed everything: "You answering one person fully is worth more than a thousand people getting a generic heart emoji." So I stopped doing drive-by hearts and started doing fewer, deeper replies. It changed how the whole thing feels.

The One That Haunts Me (In a Good Way)

There's a letter I keep separate from the drawer. No name, just a return address in New Mexico. It said, simply: "I was having a really bad night and your video came on. I'm still here because of dumb little videos like yours. Keep making them."

I've never answered it because I don't know what to say that wouldn't be smaller than what they said. Some messages don't need a reply. They need to be carried.

The Line I Refuse to Cross

One more thing, because I think it matters: I don't read messages that speculate about my family, my body, or my relationships, and I've trained myself to scroll past without engaging. That's not coldness — it's how I protect the version of this connection that's actually good for both of us.

The whole point of this weird job is that it's a two-way street. You send your lives into my inbox, and I try to send something real back. The system isn't perfect. The drawer is getting full. But I'd rather be buried in your letters than never receive them at all.

Keep writing. I'm reading.