I was one of the only kids in college who had a reason to go to the P.O. box at the end of the day, and that was mainly because my mother has never believed in email, in Facebook, in texting or cell phones in general. And so while other kids were BBM-ing their parents, I was literally waiting by the mailbox to get a letter from home to see how the weekend had gone, which was a little frustrating when Grandma was in the hospital, but I was just looking for some sort of scribble, some unkempt cursive from my mother.
Bila sem ena redkih na kolidžu z razlogom, da sem šla ob koncu dneva vedno do nabiralnika, predvsem zato, ker moja mati nikoli ni verjela v e-maile, Facebook, SMS-e ali mobilne telefone nasploh. In ko so tako ostali pisali SMS-e staršem, sem sama dobesedno čakala pri nabiralniku na pismo od doma, da sem izvedela, kakšen je bil vikend, kar je bilo kar sitno, ko je bila babica v bolnici, toda potrebovala sem malce maminih čačk, njene površne ležeče pisave.
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.
In ko sem se po kolidžu preselila v New York in me je brez opozorila zadela in podrla depresija, sem naredila edino, česar sem se takrat lahko domislila. Pisma, kakršna sem dobivala od mame, sem začela pisati za popolne neznance in jih podtikala po vsem mestu, na ducate pisem. Puščala sem jih povsod, v kavarnah in knjižnicah, pri OZN, povsod. Pisala sem blog o pismih in dnevih, ko sem jih potrebovala, in bralcem sem na internetu precej noro obljubila: če me prosite za ročno napisano pismo, ga bom napisala, brez vprašanj. Moj e-nabiralnik se je čez noč spremenil v pristanišče strtih src ... mati samohranilka iz Sacramenta, ustrahovano dekle iz podeželskega Kansasa, vsi so se obrnili name, 22-letnico, ki sem komaj vedela, kakšno kavo pijem, naj jim napišem ljubezensko pismo in tako dam razlog za čakanje ob nabiralniku.
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.
No, danes vodim svetovno organizacijo, ki jo poganjajo tiste poti do nabiralnika in način, kako lahko danes izkoristimo družabna omrežja kot nikoli prej, da napišemo in pošljemo pisma neznancem, ko jih najbolj potrebujejo, predvsem pa jo poganjajo takšni zaboji pisem, kot tale moj zvesti zabojček, poln rokopisov običajnih ljudi, pisma neznancev neznancem, ne zato da bi se dobili in smejali na kavi, ampak zato, ker so našli en drugega preko pisanja pisem.
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.
Ampak, kar me vedno zadene ob teh pismih, je, da so večino napisali ljudje, ki se niso nikoli čutili ljubljene zaradi lista papirja. Ne morejo nam pripovedovati o črnilu na lastnih ljubezenskih pismih. So posamezniki moje generacije, tisti, ki so odrasli v svetu, kjer ni nič na papirju, in kjer nekatere izmed najboljših pogovorov doživimo preko ekranov. Naučili smo se svoje bolesti zaupati Facebooku in naglo izražati v 140 znakih ali manj.
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.
Toda kaj če tokrat ne gre za učinkovitost? Včeraj sem se peljala s podzemno s tem zabojem, kar je dober povod za začetek pogovora, resnično, če ga kdaj potrebujete, nosite s sabo zaboj. Nek moški je kar strmel vame in mi nato rekel: "Zakaj enostavno ne uporabite interneta?" Mislila sem si: "Gospod, nisem strateg, niti specialist. Sem le pripovedovalka zgodb." Tako vam lahko povem o ženski, katere mož se je ravnokar vrnil iz Afganistana, ona pa ima težave s ponovnim vzpostavljanjem pogovora in tako nastavlja ljubezenska pisma po vsej hiši, da bi mu povedala: "Vrni se k meni. Najdi me, ko boš zmogel." Ali o dekletu, ki se je odločilo nastavljati ljubezenska pisma po kampusu v Dubuqueu v Iowi, samo da vidi, kako se njen trud verižno širi, ko gre naslednji dan v park pri kampusu in njena ljubezenska pisma visijo z dreves in tičijo v grmih in klopeh. Ali o možu, ki se odloči, da si bo vzel življenje, se preko Facebooka poslovi od prijateljev in družine. No, danes varno spi ob kupčku pisem, kot je tale, pod blazino. Napisali so jih neznanci, ki so bili tam, ko ...
These are the kinds of stories that convinced me that letter-writing will never again need to flip back her hair and talk about efficiency, because she is an art form now, all the parts of her, the signing, the scripting, the mailing, the doodles in the margins. The mere fact that somebody would even just sit down, pull out a piece of paper and think about someone the whole way through, with an intention that is so much harder to unearth when the browser is up and the iPhone is pinging and we've got six conversations rolling in at once, that is an art form that does not fall down to the Goliath of "get faster," no matter how many social networks we might join. We still clutch close these letters to our chest, to the words that speak louder than loud, when we turn pages into palettes to say the things that we have needed to say, the words that we have needed to write, to sisters and brothers and even to strangers, for far too long. Thank you. (Applause) (Applause)
Zaradi takih zgodb verjamem, da pisanju pisem ne bo nikoli več treba iskati pozornosti in govoriti o učinkovitosti, saj je postalo oblika umetniškega ustvarjanja, vsi deli tega - podpisovanje, rokopis, pošiljanje, čečkarije na robovih. Že zgolj dejstvo, da se je nekdo pripravljen usesti, vzeti list papirja in razmisliti o nekom z namenom, ki toliko težje pride na plano, ko je prižgan internet, iPhone brni in hkrati sodelujemo v 6 pogovorih. Je oblika ustvarjanja, ki ne bo padla pod pestmi goljatovskega stremljenja k hitrosti, ne glede na to, v koliko družabnih omrežij se še vpišemo. Ta pisma si še vedno pritiskamo k srcu, stiskamo besede, ki nas nagovarjajo glasneje kot glasno, ko preobračamo strani v palete, da povemo, kar moramo povedati, besede, ki smo jih morali napisati, sestram, bratom, celo neznancem, dolgo, predolgo. Hvala.