Walking around London, you might stumble upon a letter.
It’s addressed to you, your neighbour, and to the people stepping around as you are reading it in the middle of the street, too.
At its top, an intriguing opening: ‘Dear Stranger’, accompanied by two smiley faces.
They are carrying emotionally vulnerable messages, inviting anyone who stops to read them to reflect on mental health, belonging, and community.
At the project’s core is what can be described as the evil of the century: loneliness.
Photo credit: Jay Ventress
Everyone is the recipient. Who’s the sender?
Behind all the Dear Stranger letters is Jay Ventress, 29, originally from the East Riding countryside.
We meet in a cafe in St Pancras International, as he gets off a Eurostar from Brussels.
He’s in London for a gig as a camera engineer, but will also use this time to meet as many people as possible in the city, because “everyone has got a story to tell”.
He begins telling me his own.
The first Dear Stranger letter was posted in November 2020 in Melbourne, Australia.
“I basically recycle emotions and turn them into little scraps of hope”
Jay Ventress
“I started it because I was in a pretty bad place when the pandemic hit, I couldn’t go home because there were no flights and I couldn’t get work.
“I was getting quite depressed, so I would go out and just talk to people living on the street.”
“Hearing all this gutter philosophy, started making me feel really good. Things like when you’re so far down on the concrete, the only angle you can look is up.
“And then I realised: Why don’t I write a letter that I would want to find myself on the street? So I wrote Dear Stranger, posted the letter, walked away, and came back pretending it wasn’t me. It made me feel better.”
Photo credit: Jay Ventress
Dear Stranger letters around the world
Dear Stranger letters have been posted in 14 countries for over five years.
They have had resonance in all countries Jay visited, including Egypt, Morocco and Uzbekistan.
The camera engineer says his bigger mission is to “show that no matter what culture, what country or religion, everyone feels human emotion. I want to show that we’re all similar”.
Photo credit: Jay Ventress
The 29 year old did experience a “wake up call” in some places he visited: “The western idea of struggle is different to a country where people struggle just to eat a loaf of bread.
“This has taught me to keep this into consideration: who am I to come over and tell some of these people things are going to get better when I cannot even contextualise their idea of struggle?
“Also in some of these countries, it’s taboo to talk about mental health”, he notes. “Most of the people responding to me must be of a certain wealth class to even have a phone and to know English”.
The difference a letter can make: hearing from the strangers
The moments Jay creates with his Dear Stranger letters resonate with people.
He can receive up to 300 messages in just a few days when he does a letter run like he did in London, describing the impact a letter had.
Listen to content strategist Sonia Taourghi, 44, who found a Dear Stranger letter on Waterloo place in London.
Listen to tattoo artist Biko Dadzie, 45, on his experience with Dear Stranger letters.
It sometimes can be challenging to receive so many messages.
Jay said: “When you’re receiving this much, you kind of… It f*cks your brain.
“I’ve had all kinds of messages. Some are harder than others”, he added.
“Many of them are very light-hearted, very beautiful, but I’ve had at least six or seven people who were going to kill themselves and then saw the letter as something telling them not to do it. That gets a little heavy.”
The moment behind the letter
Jay estimates he has written over 120 different letters since his first one.
It is crucial to the 29 year old that each of them come from a place of truth: “When I feel loneliness or anxiety or loss, I try and translate that into something hopeful.
“I basically recycle emotions and turn them into little scraps of hope, so a future me would read that and feel good or a stranger would read that and feel hopeful.”
It’s safe to say plenty of people have.
While more than a thousand prints of his letters were posted all over London this winter, it is unclear how many remain intact now.
This doesn’t bother Jay the slightest.
“I really like the idea that they get destroyed,” said the camera engineer. “When you come to read the letter, you have a moment with it, you might really enjoy it, but you come back tomorrow and it might be gone.
“The whole idea and poetry of the project is also to make people cherish the moment, and not rush it.”
Having heard back from people of all ages and nationalities, Jay is convinced that “the common trait is loneliness”.
That is part of the reason why, going full circle, he now uses his platform to meet as many people as possible, especially those who send him a letter of their own.
Featured Image Credit: Jay Ventress
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