Dear First Person,

How’s it going? I was just thinking to myself about how often are things written to you. Most blogs are written in First Person, and that’s pretty great. Coming in a close second would be Third Person, lots and lots of narrative is written in Third Person. You also get to have dibs on most journalistic stuff, although that’s often written in passive voice to hide the fact that it’s First Person.

I hardly ever see anything written in Second Person, it’s hard to tell a story in ‘you’ but I know it’s been done. Frequently by people who are studying creative writing and want to challenge themselves, or prove that they’re different, or to be original – but who can really be original anymore?

I don’t know where I’d been without you, First Person. It would certainly be a much more confusing world if you, Second and Third person were all the same. I mean it’s difficult enough that Second Person singular and plural are the same in English, what if you and Third Person behaved like that?

Sure, it might lead to less of an ‘us’ and ‘them’ mentality, because ‘us’ wouldn’t exist, or at least wouldn’t be distinguishable from ‘I’ and ‘they’ wouldn’t be different to ‘he/she/it’, but it might also mean that no one ever felt connected to anyone else because everything is ‘I’. And while we’re on the subject, could you get together with Third Person and come up with a gender non-specific singular pronoun that isn’t ‘it’? That would really help with stuff, and ‘it’ is pretty awful when referring to human beings.

I should probably let you go now, actually, before we get too far down a pronoun rabbit hole. This was just a quick note to show my appreciation for your participation in my language. I’ll see you around.

All my love,

Fleur