Maybe it started with a traveling poet at a summer festival, or people holding up “Free Hugs” posters, or women writing “You are stunning” on stickies and leaving them on restroom mirrors.
Maybe it started with an Australian teenager named Ethan who posted instructions on YouTube, where close to 12,000 people have clicked on his invitation to join the You Are Beautiful Campaign.
Maybe it doesn’t matter where it started. Just that it’s hitting the ground locally.
That landfall will be as soft as an envelope settling onto a lunchroom table, a desk or a lawn.
Inside the envelope, which says “Read Me,” will be a hand-written, three-word message: “You Are Beautiful.” There may be rainbows, stars, hearts or other evidence of girl power. There may be a postscript, “inside and out,” or a signature, “From: Me. To: You.”
This first round likely will originate in University Place.
That’s where China Paulman, 12, lives and goes to Narrows View Intermediate School with fellow sixth-grader Abby Price, 12. They and Natalie Pederson, 11, a sixth-grader at Drum Intermediate School, and Olivia Margullis, 14, in the eighth grade at Curtis Junior High School, are forming the first local You Are Beautiful cell.
They are among the rush of tweens and teens realizing the reach and influence new media give them.
Luckily for us, they are using those superpowers for good and not for evil.
OhheyBree is one of the Beautiful YouTube ringleaders. Not that China and her friends have ever met her.
China subscribes to OhheyBree’s videos, and caught her relay of the YouTube video that Ethan invited everyone to copy.
Then China did what today’s girls do when they want to share a good idea: She built a site on Facebook. Everyone is welcome.
“All you do is write you ARE beautiful on a piece of paper,” she wrote in the instructions. “On the envelope write: READ ME! And the next time you go out into public, just drop it randomly and make a difference :) (you can make more than one!).”
She’s tried it, and confronted the litter conundrum with two envelopes.
“You can put it between stuff like books or merchandise at a store,” China said. “I put them between the mascara and hairspray at the Rite Aid off of 19th and Mildred. It was on Monday. One of them was a huge orange envelope.”
The girls say the notion that people will think the envelopes are full of anthrax is paranoid piffle. As to litter, if they saw a letter marked “Read Me” on the ground, they’d pick it up.
China thinks the people who found hers felt as she would have: happy and confident. That, in turn, makes her feel happy and confident.
Abby cannot imagine a downside to getting a letter telling her she’s beautiful.
It’s always good to read or hear that, Olivia said, “especially if you’re having a bad day or someone called you ugly.”
“People at my school call each other ugly all the time,” China said.
“It only gets worse in junior high,” Olivia replied. “Fifth-grade drama was nothing compared to eighth-grade drama. I’ve heard it gets better in ninth.”
Waiting for ninth grade is a rotten option.
“If someone is mean to you, you feel bad,” Natalie said. “You might take it out on someone else. Some people who get bullied at my school seem very depressed.”
In that atmosphere, random letters can fight a real problem.
One kid feels better for getting the letter. Another feels better for sending it. Do-right endorphins get contagious. The culture makes a healthy shift, all without studies, policies and programs – just the power of kindness.
China’s team is considering targeted drops, possibly among people fighting cancer. They’re thinking about ordering elastic bracelets to make a style statement.
They want to make saying You are Beautiful a lifestyle.
Kathleen Merryman: 253-597-8677
kathleen.merryman@thenewstribune.com
blog.thenewstribune.com/street
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