Nancy Davis Kho

Bio

Nancy Davis Kho is a freelance writer whose work has appeared in the Washington Post, San Francisco Chronicle, US Magazine, The Rumpus, and The Toast. She's been recognized as a Voice of the Year in the Humor Category by BlogHer and was the inaugural champion of Oakland's Literary Death Match. She covers “the years between being hip and breaking one” at MidlifeMixtape.com and on the Midlife Mixtape Podcast, available on all major podcast platforms. Nancy's book THE THANK-YOU PROJECT: Cultivating Happiness One Letter of Gratitude at a Time was published by Running Press in December 2019. More at www.DavisKho.com.

Nancy Davis Kho Articles

Photo by Carolyn V on Unsplash

You Wrote To Whom?!

On the one hand, he kind of broke my heart, during a cold and awkward goodbye dinner at a cheap Ethiopian restaurant in Philadelphia. On the other hand, he proved to me that the unicorn combo of good looks, sense of humor, and brains really did exist in the wild and that I wasn’t crazy to keep my standards high in looking for it.

The dude in question was a doe-eyed guy I briefly dated in college, and the reason I was thinking of him was that I was smack-dab in the middle of a project I undertook years later, to write thank-you letters to people who had helped, inspired, or shaped me up to that point in my life.

I’d knocked off the easy categories of “helping” and “inspiring” people first, writing a single one-page letter every week to family members, my closest friends, teachers, mentors, favorite authors.

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