And so when I moved to New York City after college and got
completely sucker-punched in the face by depression, I did the only thing I
could think of at the time. I wrote those same kinds of letters that my mother
had written me for strangers, and tucked them all throughout the city, dozens
and dozens of them. I left them everywhere, in cafes and in libraries, at the
U.N., everywhere. I blogged about those letters and the days when they were
necessary, and I posed a kind of crazy promise to the Internet: that if you
asked me for a hand-written letter, I would write you one, no questions asked.
Overnight, my inbox morphed into this harbor of heartbreak -- a single mother
in Sacramento, a girl being bullied in rural Kansas, all asking me, a 22-year-old
girl who barely even knew her own coffee order, to write them a love letter and
give them a reason to wait by the mailbox.

Well, today I fuel a global organization that is fueled by
those trips to the mailbox, fueled by the ways in which we can harness social
media like never before to write and mail strangers letters when they need them
most, but most of all, fueled by crates of mail like this one, my trusty mail
crate, filled with the scriptings of ordinary people, strangers writing letters
to other strangers not because they're ever going to meet and laugh over a cup
of coffee, but because they have found one another by way of letter-writing.

But, you know, the thing that always gets me about these
letters is that most of them have been written by people that have never known
themselves loved on a piece of paper. They could not tell you about the ink of
their own love letters. They're the ones from my generation, the ones of us
that have grown up into a world where everything is paperless, and where some of
our best conversations have happened upon a screen. We have learned to diary
our pain onto Facebook, and we speak swiftly in 140 characters or less.

But what if it's not about efficiency this time? I was on
the subway yesterday with this mail crate, which is a conversation starter, let
me tell you. If you ever need one, just carry one of these. (Laughter) And a
man just stared at me, and he was like, "Well, why don't you use the
Internet?" And I thought, "Well, sir, I am not a strategist, nor am I
specialist. I am merely a storyteller." And so I could tell you about a
woman whose husband has just come home from Afghanistan, and she is having a
hard time unearthing this thing called conversation, and so she tucks love
letters throughout the house as a way to say, "Come back to me. Find me
when you can." Or a girl who decides that she is going to leave love
letters around her campus in Dubuque, Iowa, only to find her efforts
ripple-effected the next day when she walks out onto the quad and finds love
letters hanging from the trees, tucked in the bushes and the benches. Or the
man who decides that he is going to take his life, uses Facebook as a way to
say goodbye to friends and family. Well, tonight he sleeps safely with a stack
of letters just like this one tucked beneath his pillow, scripted by strangers
who were there for him when.