Caroline Catlin is an unlikely optimist. A lot of her life revolves around death.
She works as a grief counselor for kids and teenagers who have lost a loved one. She volunteers taking pictures for terminally ill patients and their families. And she has an incurable form of brain cancer: Grade 3 anaplastic astrocytoma.
So maybe it’s surprising that she is also the creator of a sunny little box on her sidewalk in Seattle with a sign that reads “little free pep talk library.”
Some of the notes inside read:
Long ago, you were kind to someone, and they still remember!
Baby steps are still progress. Growth and healing are never linear. You’re doing great.
A little bigger than a mailbox, the bright yellow box is tucked into the ivy. Inside are two baskets of index cards: One says “take one” and one says “make one.”
Once Catlin watched her mailman walk past and then return to write a note. It read, “Tough times pass but tough people last.”
Catlin’s favorite pep talks are the ones that clearly come from kids, like one that said “You are a good friend” with a backward n.
Catlin set up the box about a year ago toward the end of a long, gray winter when she was feeling a heaviness about things in her life and in the world. She wanted something bright, and found the yellow cube on Facebook Marketplace. A friend helped her mount it to the fence outside her home.
“I needed to do something to make things a little brighter,” Catlin said. “Even though it was a small thing, it felt significant to me.”
Catlin struggled for years with headaches, fatigue and memory loss before finally getting a diagnosis in January 2019.
“I was in grad school, and I just couldn’t function,” she said.
Doctors found terminal brain cancer. She was 27, and she was told she had three to five years to live.
Catlin paused her studies to focus on her treatment — surgery, radiation and chemotherapy.
“I remember early in my diagnosis, I would just be in bed sobbing,” she said.
Catlin worried that she might not live to see her brothers get married or that she and her now-wife might not become parents or grow old together. “And then, at some point, I had to stop crying and get up and wash my face and eat food and be with my family,” she said.
This balancing act — holding both her grief and her drive to keep going — fed her work as a grief counselor and end-of-life photographer for families.
Her treatment went better than her doctors expected, and Catlin’s cancer has been stable for almost seven years. She has a scan every five months to check for a reoccurrence and feels as of she’s living in limbo between feeling grateful and fearful.
Catlin’s work and her creative projects keep her going. When she was in treatment for her cancer, she and her friends started making up “Joy Missions” for one another.
“We would have to find one thing — like, where is the best cookie in this whole area?” Catlin said. Those moments of happiness became a lifeline for Catlin, and she said her pep talk box is a way to share those feelings with her community.
In the summer when she has flowers in her garden, she and her wife pick them and leave them for passersby. Recently a neighbor left a note thanking the couple, saying they came by often to pick up flowers this past summer after their mother died.
Catlin said she sees at least one person stopping by every day — more when the weather is good. Recently she posted in a neighborhood group soliciting new pep talks, and she got a reply from a stranger: “This spot gives me so much joy every time I walk by with my dog! Was going through a hard time last year and picked a card that honestly resonated with me so well in the moment.”
Recently Catlin’s little free pep talks were discovered and shared by Rachael Harms Mahlandt, the creator of the Worldwide Sidewalk Joy Map — which shows the locations of little free art galleries, puzzle exchanges, toy swaps, mug exchanges and more.
The project started during the coronavirus pandemic, when she and her family would go for walks near their home in Portland, Oregon, and discovered boxes that people had set up to bring their communities a little closer.
“We have tons of Little Free Libraries. But then we’d see there’s a place where you can swap toy cars,” Harms Mahlandt said. “Here’s a diorama that changes monthly with a local artist’s art in tiny form. My kids were enamored of these spots, but then I was, too.”
She and her children made a “Dinorama” featuring their little toy dinosaurs. That grew into a “Dino Exchange,” and they’ve since added other installations to their yard.
Harms Mahlandt and another local artist made a map for people to explore little free spaces in Portland. The original map had 26 spots, but now her worldwide map has more than 800, and Harms Mahlandt said it’s constantly growing.
Harms Mahlandt receives submissions every day from people all over the world who encounter or make these sidewalk creations. The day she received a submission from someone about Catlin’s pep talk box, it immediately stood out.
“Then I actually got to visit Seattle last weekend and got to see it in person,” Harms Mahlandt said.
At the time she didn’t know Catlin’s story — but when she learned that the creator of the pep talk box has terminal cancer, she was stunned.
“I think it’s really easy for us when we’re dealt a really rough hand like that to be really bitter, to be really negative,” Harms Mahlandt said. “So when people are going through something like that and then choose to make a free pep talk library with their time and energy that is limited…. it’s really beautiful.”
Catlin said that for her, there’s no other choice.
“You have to actively choose life and finding hope and cultivating joy every single day or else it’s not necessarily going to show up for you,” she said.
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