Hey, I'm Elise Hugh with Ted Talks Daily. Storyteller and writer Hannah Brencher grew up in our screen-dominated, paperless world. So when she was 22, she did something radical. She wrote dozens and dozens of handwritten letters to strangers and left them across New York in bushes and benches.

In today's archive talk from a Ted Salon in 2012, she recounts this effort of hers and

the moving impact it made on others. If you're at all like me, you might find it'll inspire

you to return to letter writing. I was one of the only kids in college who had a

reason to go to the PO box at the end of the day. And that was mainly because my mother has never

believed in email, in Facebook and texting, or cell phones in general. And so while other kids were

BBMing 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.

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 UN everywhere. I blogged about

those letters in the days when they were necessary, and I posed a kind of crazy promise to the

internet that if you asked me for a handwritten 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,

...