What Is the Unsent Letter Mailbox? Inside NYC's Anonymous Letter Project

I picked up woodworking in September 2023 at a time when little else made sense — a collaboration had fallen through and I was left feeling, again, like a failure. I found myself in a familiar muck, questioning my belonging in a world that felt at once too small and too large.

Around that time, a friend gave me a copy of Women Who Run With the Wolves. In it, Clarissa Pinkola Estés unearths feminine archetypes buried in old folk tales. One line read: "When you feel like you want to die, it's not because you physically have to. Rather, a part that no longer serves you must die."

So I let the aspiring entrepreneur die — the part of me that craved recognizable success — and settled for "craftswoman" instead: one who works with her hands. I'm not a good craftswoman by most standards. I lack a sense of distance, which makes measurements hard. That's how, in January 2024, I ended up building a mailbox twice the size of any functional one — an accident I generously reclassified as an "urban installation," and dragged to the center of Washington Square Park on Valentine's Day.

I inscribed the words "Unsent Letters Only" on the side, and asked a friend, Elly Viazy, to draw a scrappy mailbox rat — one who, like much of our emotional landscape, moves through the city's underground mostly unnoticed. A rat who, like an ugly thought, pops up at the most inconvenient of times to scare the shit out of our friends, but does so in the most honest of ways.

Why an Unsent Letter, and Why a Mailbox

A mailbox is a medium of communication — a space for words meant to be read and sent. It also separates the sender from the intended reader through distance, and the mounting anticipation with which the former awaits a response.

The communication theorist Marshall McLuhan wrote "the medium is the message" in 1964. Every so often, a new means of communication comes along and completely changes our relationship to the world around us — the way free city mail delivery changed the American front yard, the way television changed the American living room. Today our screens have gotten smaller and our access to information a whole lot bigger. We are more connected to the world than we have ever been. And we are so alone.

We ride jam-packed subways elbow-to-elbow with people whose names we will never know and whose faces we will likely never see again. Anonymity is the common denominator of urban life. We don't have to wait for our loved ones to send winding notes to our doorstep anymore. It's a time of unprecedented immediacy — which makes me think that intimacy has been lost along with our capacity to wait for the mailman.

It takes time to conjure words. Ink cannot be rushed any more than our thoughts can, which is why there's something deeply pleasurable about writing at the same pace as a feeling makes itself felt. A handwritten note is the most private of places — more so if it has no intended destination.

The Unsent Letter Mailbox is, in the simplest of ways, an act of joyful deviance. We've reclaimed anonymity as a space for intimacy, to recover a sense of complicity with the stranger next door.

What People Write in Their Unsent Letters

The archive has since grown to more than 1,500 unsent letters — of love, of regret, of gratitude, and of grief. Your words have made strangers cry, and have legitimized someone's hopelessness, or their unrequited love. As a result, we all feel a little more understood in the depths of our existential muck.

Here are a few that have moved me most.

"My Power Was Never Yours to Take"

I love this one because it's an honest expression of anger completed. We seldom let ourselves feel anger through to its end… it's like edging yourself only to walk away before the release. Unexpressed anger doesn't disappear; it lingers. Little angers that stay acquire the sticky form of resentment, and, snowballing, will eventually crush an undeserving bystander in their way. In a culture that praises politeness (the white grinning smile of the coffee shop barista) we've lost the ability to be genuinely mad, the kind of mad that shows its fangs at the right time and makes room for outrage. This writer let their fangs drop. They bit down hard, drew blood, and I'm sure, finally quenched an old thirst for justice.

"Small, Small, Small"

unsent letter collected during a public unsent letter mailbox installation in Washington Square Park, NYC

How many of us feel like we're falling short of some big destiny promised to us? Work hard and things will fall into place. Work hard and you'll be loved. It often feels like we're swimming in a well of expectations thrust on us by a culture we were born into but didn't choose. Feeling small is conditional, not innate. We are all too small for the gigantic coat of expectations we wear to be the perfect coworker, partner, parent. Of course we will never be good enough. There's something beautiful in the honesty of naming the fear that makes us curl up in the furthest corner of a life so big. But this anonymous writer is reaching for a largeness of experience — a deep desire that, for fear of falling short, most of us shy away from. It's there for the taking.

"Dear Z, I Wish It Were Meant to Be"

Anonymous unsent note collected during a Public Unsent Letter Mailbox installation in Austin, Texas (2025)

Ah, the ex-lover! that untouchable creature always just out of reach. We've all felt that tug of regret. What if we had done things a little differently, paid more attention, tried harder? I'm in awe of the lyrical way this writer touches regret so lightly. To look to the past for a glimmer of future is deeply human. Our past is forever tinted in the orange and violet hues of sunset, but a sunset is always more beautiful at a distance.

I once read that poetry is the soul inaugurating a form. In this case, a mailbox has become the space for multiple souls to render their unspeakable truths tangible. We write with the sole purpose of knowing ourselves better (not to be known) and in that process, see in a stranger's plight something resembling our own.

Write Your Own Unsent Letter

If there's something you've never been able to send ( to a parent, an ex, a friend, or no one in particular) the mailbox is open. Submit your unsent letter here.