A couple of months ago, I shared a post about a wonderful Twitter campaign called #secretnotes, in which individuals are encouraged to leave uplifting messages for strangers to stumble across in their daily lives. This post spread like wildfire! So, it was fitting that when my friend Maisie-Rose, a founder of the #secretnotes movement, suggested I look into Love From Future You, I discovered another gem of an organization! |
I was lucky enough to speak with Cassie, my new friend from Dublin, and one of the founders of Love From Future You. The mission of Love From Future You is simple:
- Visitors can submit advice, in the form of a letter to their younger selves, that they wish they had heard when they were going through a challenging time in life.
- These letters are then compiled into a universal letter of love, to encourage people currently struggling.
Cassie explains:
Love From Future You was inspired by an incident that happened in Dublin. A man in distress had climbed a building and was threatening to jump. Myself and a friend were really surprised at the response to the incident on Facebook and Twitter. The general consensus was really negative - it was as though the man's distress was inconvenient to people.
We decided that we wanted to change the conversation around mental illness. We felt it was important that people saw mental illness as something that affects everybody instead of something that only a fraction of people suffer from. So the idea to have people share the advice they would give themselves grew from that. We felt writing a letter would be very personal and effective in conveying the sensitive message. We then took to Facebook and Twitter to spread the message. We made really simple images and a very simple website, and the project just really took off.
I think the success of it is that it is so personal and also so therapeutic to write a letter. It wasn't medical advice or advice from experts- it's advice from everyone. The video in particular is so touching because every word is part of a bigger story. So many lives are contained in three minutes."
The response online has been really incredible. What we set out to achieve was to give people something that they could share easily and say part of me is in this. Organisations have shared it, but seeing the response from individuals has really been the most encouraging part so far. We follow it very closely and have seen conversations popping up where people are opening up about advice and really being inspired by the piece.
The plan for the future is to make more videos based on specific issues. Certain themes arose in many videos so we'd like to make some like 'Advice from your future self on your first day of school' or 'Advice from future you after your first heart break.' Some were even more poignant. I was surprised at the amount of responses we received from people who had suffered from eating disorders and from women who were in abusive relationships. We'd like to take each of these issues individually and explore it further."
When have you struggled in your life? When did you need advice most?
Take a moment and write a letter to that version of yourself, and then send it off to [email protected]. What a simple way to help uplift a stranger... and possibly help save a life.