People in my town, when they see me in public, they go, “Oh, are you the sign lady?” But my name is actually Amy. And, yes, I am that sign lady.
A few years ago I was meeting with some friends. We meet together every week and one night our friend named Mark, who was a teacher in the school district, said, “You guys would never believe the suicide rates in our town.”
I was just floored. What should we do about it? What can I do about it? And I had this idea of encouraging yard signs for years. It would always bounce around. I’d kind of see them in my mind’s eye, but I really didn’t have a reason to print them until that night a couple years ago.
And I thought, at least I can start putting hope on yard signs all over town. The signs said things like “You Matter,” “Don’t Give Up,” “Your Mistakes Don’t Define You.” And really, the idea was not just about suicide, but that anyone anywhere needing a little bit of a boost might be encouraged by the signs.
So we put them out and that’s when the messages started coming in, “Who put these out?” On Facebook, they’d put posts, “Was it a church, Rotary, a school?” And when people started requesting the signs I thought, “We’re onto something. People want to put out hope on signs in their yards.” And so we facilitated that for them.
I’ve gotten messages from widows and addicts, people just finding out about a health diagnosis, a devastating one, or lost a loved one, and these messages have just hit them at the right place and at the right time.
I got a message on Instagram from a young woman who said, “Recently, my brother committed suicide and I found him. My husband’s deploying. I’m struggling with infertility. and out in the middle of nowhere, I saw two yard signs strapped to a big metal post and it said ‘One Day At A Time, Don’t Give Up.'” She said it meant everything.
She pulled over, she took a picture, and it gave her resolve for another day. It gave her hope for another day. It didn’t solve her problems, but they do give you a moment of new hope that stirs up where we believe that we can overcome something.
So one of the beautiful byproducts of the movement is hearing how, really, such simple words can mean so much to other people. We think it’s hard. We think encouraging one another is hard. But really it just takes showing up, being unafraid of other people’s pain, and offering these encouraging words not as band-aids to wounds, not to hurry people’s healing, but to just say, “I’m here.”
Because really, when it comes down to it, we’re all messed up and we all have our wounds and we all have the things that we struggle with, but we’re all also doing it together.
