Nicole Leth is a professionally-trained artist with a long history of clothing design and writing. To spread healing, hope, and love, Nicole rents billboards and sends thousands of postcards a month with affirmative messages.

What role has art played in your life?

The role that art has played in my life has been monumental. Art has been my healing process. Art gave me a filter in which to digest my human trauma and also the trauma and humanity of others. Art gave me a way to constantly recalibrate and learn to create beauty from hard moments.

My art practice has been focused on the human condition, research of the human healing process, and compassionate spaces of connection. I’ve always made work, in one way or another, surrounding those key pillars.

When did you start your affirmation project?

The affirmation project unofficially started when I was in high school in 2010. I was trying to understand and heal from the suicide of my father that had occurred that year. I didn’t know what to do so I started spray painting comforting words of affirmation on abandoned buildings in my hometown. Participating in random acts of loving kindness and sending compassion out to strangers helped my own healing process exponentially. I kept at it.

For the next decade I experimented with this idea of writing and sharing and creating things and places and environments for strangers to find healing and compassion and anonymous connection. I created affirmation stickers and left them around the country. I sent out letters and postcards to strangers around the world. I volunteered and created interactive healing events and interviewed people and wrote and shared my writing about healing and the human experiences I had witnessed.

I never really thought of what I was doing as a “project” that I was working on -- these were things I just kind of did silently and by myself at the end of the day because I needed to, because it felt purposeful and intimate and helped me make sense of the world around me and how I wanted to care for people.

All of these bits and pieces finally culminated last summer when I decided to anonymously rent a billboard to share an affirmation that had been running through my mind. It was a billboard off of 71 South that said “ You are human, you are lovable, you are strong, you are enough”.

It was a peak time in politics and worldly chaos and collective hurt and people all around me were hurting and I felt powerless and overwhelmed by what I was witnessing. I wanted to do something to fight back, to resist being hardened by hard times but instead pouring compassion into strangers, to share my heart to make someone else’s a little lighter. This is what I consider the affirmation project’s “official” start.

How did you decide to use billboards as your medium?

The idea to use billboards just came to me as I was driving down the highway one day. I was thinking about the intimate experience of driving in the car and how it’s the place where a lot of folks digest their day or process their emotions. I wanted to offer support to them in that space. I also thought about the accessibility of billboards; they are free to consume, they can be viewed easily or dismissed easily, and they are a space often utilized to tell people what they need to buy, consume, or become in order to become more fulfilled. I wanted to reclaim this platform to offer love and healing and compassion for the sake of love and healing and compassion. I hoped it could be a little compassion in an unexpected place that could impact people who needed it in an unexpected way.

How many billboards have you put up since you began the project?

I have put up over 600 billboards in the past year. These billboards have been in most major cities around the country, and a few have made it around the world. They have had many different messages written on them, but they’ve all been filled with love.

Where do you find inspiration for the messages?

To be honest, I write messages that reflect things I need to hear or be reminded of or things I would want to tell people I love. I write messages about things that I learn about the human healing condition. I listen to people hurting and I study the lineages of trauma and I try to write things that offer support to places in our human psyche that are often overlooked. To sum it all up -- I try to write from an unguarded, authentic, human place and I hope that it lands in the same place in the hearts of people who need it.

Tell us about affirmation postcards.

The affirmation postcards came as a natural next step after the billboards. I saw the impact that the billboards had and I thought about other ways I could send random acts of anonymous compassion to people in a more accessible and intimate way. I started thinking of handwritten letters and the warm feeling you get when you open up your mailbox and sift through the bills and advertisements and junk mail and find a handwritten letter filled with love. I wanted to recreate that feeling and offer support for people in that space as well. There were a few non-negotiables I needed to honor: the postcards had to be free and the postcards had to be anonymous. I created a website with a way to sign up for the postcards. I sent out the first round last December to about 250 people. Now, I send out over 2,500 postcards a month to 2,500 different humans around the world. Every month I sit down and spend hours writing the message that will be printed on that month’s postcard. I try to tune into how I’m feeling that month, what has been going on in the world, how people I connect with have been feeling, what’s been hurting, what’s been healing, and what’s been helping. I try to write from that space.

What’s something that surprised you during this journey?

Something that keeps surprising me is how important human connection is. Something that keeps surprising me is how much of a difference a little bit of love, even from a stranger, can make in someone’s life. Something that keeps surprising me is how many people tell me they don’t hear things like this enough. I hope words of empathy, affirmation, and compassion can become a larger part of our reality moving forward.

Has this project connected you with meaningful stories? Are there any you could share?

So, so, so many. I’ve heard from people who have also lost loved ones to suicide and deeply understand and connect to the purpose of this project. I’ve heard from people who struggle with mental illness and addiction and abuse and felt healed and inspired to show themselves more compassion and make a change in their lives because of the project. I’ve heard from single parents, senior citizens, veterans, activists, therapists, and regular human beings that have just said the messages were exactly what they needed to keep going on a specific day.

What’s something that’s kept you personally grounded during this challenging year?

This year has been especially challenging for me. In addition to everything happening in the world with Covid, politics, racism, and unemployment -- I also was diagnosed with a brain tumor in January. All that to say, I’ve been trying extremely hard to stay grounded during all of this. There are a handful of things that have helped exponentially. Surrendering my control over things I can’t control has been a big one, this has left more room to find joy in the little moments of every day that usually go overlooked. Joy is the one singular human emotion that actively reverses depression so I think it is pivotal to create space for it during times of chaos and unknown. I’ve been minimizing my distractions (distancing myself from social media, television, etc) so I can sit with and process the discomfort of what’s happening in the world in ways that I know are healthy and lead to proactive healing. I’ve been thinking a lot about the idea of trusting the process -- I’ve been reflecting on the things I’ve already survived in my life that felt unsurvivable at the time and I’m reminding myself of who I became because of those things. I’m reminding myself that I’ve survived 100% of everything that's ever happened in my life so far, so I absolutely have what it takes to get through anything that happens today.