I was the only kid in college with a reason to go to the mailbox, because my mother never believed in email or cell phones. I was literally waiting to get a letter to see how her weekend had gone, which was usually the warmest comfort for a girl of my age.
So when I moved to New York and got sucker-punched in the face by depression, I did the only thing I could think of. I wrote those same kinds of letters like my mother for strangers, and slipped them all over the city. I blogged about those letters and crazily promised if asked for a hand-written letter, I would write one.
Overnight, my inbox became this harbor of heartbreak—a single mother in Sacramento, a girl being bullied in Kansas, a 22-year-old immigrant, all asking me to write them and gave them a reason to wait by the mailbox. And this is how I initiated a global organization, fueled by those trips to the mailbox.
It is awesome. In fact, the thing about these letters is that most of them have been written by people who have grownup into a paperless world where some best conversations happen on a screen. We have learned to record our pain on to Facebook, and we speak swiftly in 140 characters or less.
But it's not about efficiency. And I could tell you about a woman whose husband was traumatized (受精神创伤) by his war experiences in Afghanistan and isolated himself, and her love letters slipped throughout the house eventually got him back to her. Or a man, who decides to take his own life, finally sleeps soundly with a stack of letters from strangers slipped beneath his pillow.
The scare the kinds of stories that convince me that letter-writing will always be needed even in these days, because it is an art now.
