Author: Anne L'Ecuyer

Anne is a writer and social impact executive who stays closely connected to an international network of creative leaders and individual artists. She writes about and trades vintage postcards at The Posted Past.

Something from Nothing

I’m launching a social enterprise to trade loneliness for connection one postcard at a time. My task this week: explain why and demonstrate how. Honestly, I don’t know yet. Maybe that’s the point.

Last week I felt sick, distracted, lethargic, confused. I tried making sense of this venture without much output. This morning brought a different view. Here in my writing studio—cool, empty, quiet, safe—I find peace in this small cocoon. A few sentences in, I reconnect with myself.

Recently deceased poet, Andrea Gibson, suggested we replace “depression” with “hibernation.” Fall is here, and something else is on the way.

Familiar, and Not

In the first year, The Posted Past emerged from tiny moments of inspiration that kept me alive through a grueling season. Three years ago, I shifted from arts executive to stay-at-home daughter in weeks.

I once made sharp plans, big decisions, and quickly executed on smart strategy. I excelled at drawing lines, taking risks, moving projects forward. We generated wide visibility and large dollars. Those skills served their purposes and I enjoyed it, mostly.

Now, caring for family, I’m also moving differently: small steps, quiet gestures, new ambiguities, old secrets. I’m excited to work with ephemera from the past. My aim is to attract attention to the overlooked evidence of us, and patiently appreciate all that we have been as we remake ourselves, again.

Small Things, Plenty to Notice

Every vintage postcard carries something left behind. Messages that made it, and those never sent — all since wandered into dusty collections, eager estate sales, and ribbon-tied boxes.

Upcycling this stuff makes for lovely creative practice. Remnants from earlier items that are too good to discard — an inky rose, a floral-sounding sentiment, or a detailed botanical drawing. Using these old materials draws something from nothing. We revisit these abandoned treasures (and our own ideas about junk) to feel the rush of regeneration.

We ourselves are marvelous collections gathered, arranged, and rearranged with intention (or not) over periods in time. So much is found in these second or third purposes for the past. Art card sessions can sometimes reveal those connections in your lifetime that only you really see. Then, you send it off to someone who will read into the image all they know and need.

Loneliness sometimes abaits with noise or distraction. True, but there is more. Creative practice provides for a courage that lives inside silence, grace, and patience. Making mistakes in the studio can bring sweet relief from ego and fear, and offer potent clues about what’s next.

The Posted Past is deliberately both/and. Grand sweep of time and subtle moments. Global networks and hand-delivered messages. Instant communication and patient evolution. The question isn’t big or small—it’s striking the balance that serves us now.

We’re not just trading loneliness for connection, we’re also swapping out old assumptions: that new beats old, that connection requires complexity, that everything starts from scratch. Here, in those creative tensions, we find opportunity. The magic of being in between.

I don’t know exactly how this will work, but I know why. We live with unprecedented connection and profound isolation. We can reach anyone, anywhere, instantly, yet loneliness persists as one of our greatest challenges. One small answer: work with what we have. For me, that’s a lot of postcards.

Requirements of Respite

Self-care and respite take on different qualities in times of true crisis. Maybe it’s a clue as to why I respond so poorly to the common admonitions to take care of myself. Quietly, I affirm. I do.

Most assume the concern is emotional, and it is in part. I’m aware lately that the issues are primarily physical. It is strangely difficult to eat, exercise, and sleep soundly around a person who is suffering physically. The environment is unappetizing and there is a perverse temptation to power down with them. Motivations to toil and worry are ever present. Motivations to live one’s own life require discipline.

This is a good reason to consider taking up a hobby. Craft, music, gardening, dance, or other art form works – any kind of body-based creative practice. Simple movements or minor tasks accomplished are instant balm to the common disconnections from self. Who is dancing? I am. Who made that cute cross stitch? You guessed it.

We sometimes mistake the large and visible parts of life for where meaning is made. More often, the mundane is the muck of creation. Difficulties test us, and experience is the reward. Having a creative practice is a way to curate one’s own life no matter what comes along.

That’s why I’m writing to you today and why I write every week at http://www.PostedPast.com. It helps me to be and feel alive, even (and especially) on the darkest days.

Food, exercise, and rest pair well with alive activities. Walk with a friend. Snooze in the sun with a book on your nose. Or make that special hot dish for the church potluck. Who managed to eat, move, and laugh a little? You did.

Time Traveling

As writers we know the practice takes time. Ten weeks, ten months, ten years. Today happens to be all three for me.

Ten years ago I closed the Washington Writer’s Retreat. After a wonderful five-year run hosting 31 artists, scientists, historians, anthropologists, poets, novelists, and grandmas, the retreat closed in 2014. I traded the marginal magic of the house on Bunker Hill for the rich intimacy of life next to Louise in a quiet condo. I knew my proof of concept would keep, and the need to become my next me was calling.

Ten months ago, we did the Completing and Creating Circle, a pretty great exchange all around. I came away with a drive to go deep into research on a couple of writing projects. Ironically, the time together informed an incubation period that had to be solo, and I committed to a full writing practice. I embody the moniker ‘erstwhile essayist’ here on annelecuyer.com, a space that often functions as R&D for other projects.

Ten weeks ago (or so) I started writing one essay each Wednesday for The Posted Past. This new enterprise draws on Dad’s very old postcard collection. It fills our time together, tipping the mind marbles every day to start a fun game of sorting, selecting, and detecting. Fortunately, artistic practice thrives in these crumpled corners of life. Centenarian postcards make for writing magic.

I see all this as evidence of the ripple effect in my own life, a lovely looping quality that allows for time travel.

Back to WWI and the Golden Age of Postcards, and an extraordinary time of personal engagement town-to-town and around the globe.

Forward to a time when I finish a novel thirty years in the making using AI to crush the blocks I faced in my early writing days. Forthcoming, Night Reading.

Back again through our family history to develop the draft of Crazy Creative, a social memoir on powerful women in the margins. Still so muted at this moment, it only leaks out when I’m not looking.

Slowly, my confidence grows that these efforts are all toward many more comfortable places for humans to love and writers to work. Always, I practice on myself.