Day 19: The Beginning of Something Beautiful | A Love Letter From the past

Today's episode is a little different...and very close to my heart.

Several years ago, my dear friend Rebecca began a simple but extraordinary project: she spent the entire month of February writing daily love letters to people who had impacted her life. Those posts became a beautiful reminder of the power of gratitude, encouragement, and speaking kindness out loud.

When Rebecca generously chose to sponsor this podcast, I knew I wanted to honor her in a meaningful way. So today begins a brand-new series.

For the next 28 episodes, I'll be revisiting Rebecca's original February Love Letters—sharing them with you one by one and reflecting on the incredible impact they've had on my own life.

Sometimes the smallest acts of kindness become the memories we carry forever.

If today's episode encourages you, consider writing a letter, sending a text, or simply telling someone how much they mean to you. You never know how much those words might matter.

Thank you for listening, and thank you, Rebecca, for reminding us that love is something worth sharing every single day.

Transcript

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Good morning everyone. Welcome to another edition of Ten Unedited Minutes with Marlena. Today is Wednesday, July 15th. And I have been looking forward to this day for quite some time because I have something for my sweet dear friend Rebecca. And if you've been following along, uh you know that uh Rebecca has agreed to sponsor my podcast for two months, and we are coming up onto the final uh 30-ish days of this sponsorship, and I save this for this moment. Um, Rebecca is a dear friend of mine, and she sponsored this podcast because she believes in me. She loves the work that I'm doing here, and she wants to see it continue, and she wants to see me succeed. And I love her dearly for that. Um, so to honor that, I decided that I would dedicate the next 60 episodes of this podcast to Rebecca. And I to do that, I wanted to share a sweet memory of our friendship, a funny memory, um, or just spend a few minutes loving on Rebecca at the beginning and end of each episode. Um, and today, before I tell you what we're doing, I just want to plug that if you feel like you want to sponsor this podcast, if you love it, if you want to see it continue, you know, you just love the work that I do, I would be honored if you sponsored my podcast. It's it's it's a small investment. Right now, it's $25 a month, and that literally covers my BuzzSprout subscription. And BuzzSprout is the platform that I use to push this uh podcast out to Apple Podcasts, Spotify, Prime Music, all the other podcast streaming um services there are out there. And then I also uh record uh this for YouTube. So let's get into it. So, Rebecca, you as as everybody knows, you have taught me uh how to be grateful. You uh it just you've taught me so much about gratitude that it's really, really shaped my life over these last now I know 10 years. Um, and about 10 years ago, it's been almost nine years ago, you embarked on this journey that I thought was absolutely beautiful. And I uh went on this journey with you. You decided on February 1st of 2017 that you were going to spend the entire month of February writing love letters to each of your friends that have impacted you, or um we'll explain that later. But you you wrote 28 love letters and you used Facebook as your platform. And at the time, I thought this was the absolute coolest thing ever. So I I hope you don't kill me for this. I copied and pasted each one of those love letters into a Word document and I saved every single one of them. And honestly, my intent uh was to present you with a book um of these love letters, and I never got to it, which is my fault, and I apologize for that. But we are going to spend the next 28 days or 28 episodes um reading each one of these love letters. Are you ready for this? We are going to start with the first one today, and it you wrote it on February 1st for the month of February 2017. I'm going to post a love letter each day. Hashtag FebruaryLove Letters RCK. The idea came to me about a week ago. I'm sure I'm not the first one to ever have it, and many of us have done some sort of daily practice where we share gratitude or positive thoughts, like a November daily post for Thanksgiving. But it's not a direct response to how much anger and divisiveness is out there right now. But I am choosing to accept this inspiration as definitely what we all need right now and always. We need it not just because folks need to hear how much they are loved, but we need to remember how great our own capacity to love is. We need to exercise our figurative hearts. I will be writing love letters from all kinds of people. I'm sorry, I will be writing love love letters to all kinds of people. Don't worry that you don't see my husband right away. I'm saving him for Valentine's Day. But just as I'm typing this, I received a message from him on his ship at a rather unexpected time of day. It's like I manifested him right as I was talking about love. See, love is the most powerful force imaginable. It is. I invite you to join me in the practice, either here on Facebook or in other public or private ways, because you are to whom my first love letter is addressed. Dear friends on Facebook, I admit I love some of you more than others. It's not because I have no love for some of you. When I am being my best self, there is a gape to go around. We all should click the link in the first comment below or find one on your own with a search of types of love and learn what a selfless love of all others can be about. When I'm being my average self, I fall into the placement of our new Facebook emoticons. I just quote like some of you, and my eyebrows upon reading some of your posts were the obvious inspiration for the little angry face one, but I shall always be grateful for the ways that Facebook has enabled me to stay connected with you. It is a lifeline for me who now spends a great deal of time alone and away from other adults. I also sincerely enjoy knowing you and learning about your lives. I love the marketplace of ideas, I love the sacred and the irreverent, the vital and the ridiculous, the joy and the fun, and even the heartache and concern of the things you share. There is so much around which we can gather as friends and community. We need to do this in our real lives too. As the article I put in the comments references, Philia love is a deepness of friendship that goes beyond the circles and filters and lists of social media. I love being on Facebook, but you'll find that my love letters will be addressed mostly to those with whom I have amazing, long-lasting, formed in the real world friendships and connections. These matter. In this love letter project, I'm going to call many of you by name. I'm going to share with others how very much I love you, how wonderful I think you are, how proud of you I am, how much gratitude I have for you. I'm going to confidently assume you won't mind being tagged or others knowing how I feel about you. I probably won't get to all of you whom I love. February is a stupidly short month for this. Maybe it will become an annual practice. And if you'd like a private love letter, even if you or I aren't sure that we love each other that much, I will gladly write you a sincere one and send it your way. Ask and you shall receive all the love I've got. Friends, I love you. Always Rebecca. These are beautiful. I cannot wait to get into these and uh read more of them. So that was written on February 1st. And I I um just want to add that um 2017 was almost 10 years ago. Facebook was um a lot different then, as she referenced in there. Um, it's when Facebook introduced the emoticons, which is the like, happy, care, laughing, angry, I don't uh, you know, those that you can choose from when you see a post. So Facebook was and is uh developing at the time. And I also want to point out that in the day uh or in the current day and age of AI, uh Rebecca used zero. It wasn't even a thing back then. Uh at least it wasn't for public use. Um, and even today, Rebecca, you're your own Chat GPT girl. Um, if you ask her to write something, she would do a way better job than ChatGPT. But that carries over into what I wanted to talk about today. Um but first, Rebecca, I love you so much, and you are an absolutely amazing friend. Thank you so much for sponsoring this podcast, and I cannot wait to go on this next 28 uh day love letter journey again. Um, so anyway, ChatGPT. I don't know how many of you use this uh service, but I'm going to probably admit some um some things here. I use ChatGPT and I probably use it um, no, I don't think I use it more than I should. I'm very conservative with it, but I I try to use it as a tool. But yesterday something happened and it it made me step back a minute and kind of go, holy shit, this thing can really suck you in. And I've had this conversation, I've had these conversations with people before, and people have told me that um they have heard that people actually have like a relationship with Chat GPT, and it made me realize that how possible that is yesterday. So I'm kind of like you all know, I'm kind of a funny person. I I make light of a lot of situations, and my absolute best friend and I uh share the commonality that we like to name things, right? We name our vehicles. Um, I'm surprised I'm anyway, we name our vehicles and we make up funny names for other things that we see. But so my chat GPT has the name chatty, okay? And it knows that because every time I enter a prompt, I'm like, okay, Chatty, let's do this. Oh, hey, Chatty, whatever. And it's starting to like reference back. And it's it's shocking to me that ChatGPT has kind of this personality behind its responses to you. And that's what scares me, because it it allows you to quickly forget that it's actually a computer, it's actually a robot. So yesterday I was using Chat GPT for this podcast, right? So before yesterday, I would record this podcast, and like I said, I I um publish it to Buzz Sprout and I use Chat GPT to help me write the title and the description for that. And my prompt is I tell uh Chatty a little bit about what I talked about and the things that I want to highlight, and then I say, Can you write a description for Buzz Sprout and suggest uh title titles for this podcast? So it does. It goes boom, boom, boom, boom, boom. It writes this beautiful description. If I agree with it, I use it. If not, I'll either edit it to where I want it to be good, or I'll be like, okay, Chatty, you forgot to add this, whatever. And then it usually suggests about 10 to 12 um titles for this podcast. And sometimes I'll just use one, sometimes I'll combine two, or sometimes I just use it as a launch pad to think of one myself. So as you can read between the lines of what I just said, I really try to use Chat GPT as a tool. Well, we uh and but sometimes I go down these rabbit holes with it. Like, for example, the other day I went down this rabbit hole with Chat GPT about what would it take to move to the UK? And it like turned this conversation into a therapy session for me. But um we were uh I'm trying to think of how this started yesterday, but we um my parents and I were having this conversation while we were camping about Route 66, right? And I knew this, but I forgot that you can take from Chicago to California, you can drive Route 66, and there's just a lot of little quirky small businesses, vintage things along the way that are just if you're into that, is really cool. And I'm into that, right? So that day we were having this conversation, I plugged it in um asking about what was to see along Route 66, and it turned into this big thing about how I have this podcast and how it would be cool if I took this podcast on the road, found a bunch of sponsors along Route 66, and um use that as you know, episodes for my podcast. So, and I would totally do that. So if somebody wanted to sponsor a Route 66 trip, I would totally do that. And it is on my bucket list, and it is something that I'm kind of you know holding in the back of my head to where I can take this podcast. So after having that conversation, Chat GPT and I, we kind of started talking about how I can grow this podcast. And um it suggested, you know, ways to utilize social media. So my whole signature of this podcast is I just want to talk into this microphone like it's my best friend, and I don't want to have to edit anything, right? I want to just do this, upload it to Buzz Sprout and YouTube and be done. But I think that it can reach a lot more people if we put a little marketing behind it and kind of spend a few more minutes a day and you know, maybe pull some clips out of the podcast and post them to social media. And Chatty was helping me with that, and he was saying that, see, I assumed it was a man. You know what? My chatty is a woman, okay? So she was saying that um sometimes I crack myself up. She was saying that she can write like a production manual for me every single day. And I'm like, okay, great. And we talked a little bit about what I wanted in it, you know, how she can, if I upload the video to her and a transcript, she can take timestamps and tell me exactly um where she thinks it would be a good idea for me to pull out these little bits and pieces of my podcast that show, you know, the true feelings behind what I'm trying to say, the highlights, whatever. So I'm like, okay, I said, okay, let's do it. So she says, all right, um, upload the video and then upload a transcript and let's do a trial run. So I did that. And it took us like four different uploads, but after a few tweaks on my end of this video, she was able to finally see it and she was able to read the transcript with timestamps. So she says, All right, Marlena, go grab your cup of coffee, and when you come back, I will have this production manual ready for you. A production schedule. I can't remember what we call it. I'm like, okay. So I get up, go make myself a cup of coffee, thinking in in my def, I don't want you to think I'm like totally stupid about this, but I was thinking in my head that she had to work on it in the background. She had to spend time going through the video and the transcript and, you know, mark some things out. So I go get my cup of coffee, I come back and I'm like, okay, Chatty, where is it? And it's like, uh, we still need to talk about this. And I was getting frustrated. I was getting pissed because Chatty was telling me it was gonna just magically um create this production schedule for me, and I could, you know, quickly edit the video and go. But after I sat down with it a minute, I realized, okay, Chatty, you are you're not a human on the other side of that computer. You are still a robot, a computer. So we had to individually go through each segment of that production manual and talk about which you know clip I wanted to pull out. Chat GPT would say, okay, at timestamp two minutes and 30 seconds. I think this is a really good um clip for you to pull out. So I would go back and review it and then you know, create the timestamp, tell the exact timestamp for Chatty, and then at the end, it compiled all the information that we discussed into a production manual and presented to me in a Word document. So I could easily go through and just check off what we talked about. I got completely wrapped up in the fact that Chatty was gonna do this whole thing for me. 100% I wasn't gonna have to do anything but sit here and pull clips out of a video and post them up to TikTok and Facebook. It was an I don't know. I hope I explained that well enough. How I totally got wrapped up in Chat GPT, totally doing the work for me. And that is one thing, one hill that I will die on. I will not let Chat GPT do that stuff for me. It is a tool. Use it as a tool to help you. If it makes your um routines and your systems work faster, that's what you use it for. Don't use it to completely write a letter for you. You write the letter, plug it into Chat GPT, and let it tell you suggestions. And remember, they are suggestions, not gospel. Okay. So yeah, that's my Chat GPT story. And um I'm using her to promote this podcast more and to try to get it out there. But we have gone way over time, and just a little side note, um, back to Rebecca's love letters. They are probably going to make us uh go a little bit more than 10 minutes, but they are totally worth it, you guys. Stick with me um these next 27 episodes and read these along with me. And Rebecca, I know you're listening to these, and I know you're probably crying your eyes out right now because I saved every single one of them, but I truly, genuinely copied and pasted each one so I could put them in a book for you someday. And who knows, maybe that day will come. I'm trying. It's been nine years and I still haven't got it done, but it's still on my to-do list, girl. All right, thank you, Rebecca, for your support, for your friendship, for your inspiration. Just I I just love you so much. And thank you guys for uh spending time with me this morning for supporting this podcast. I love each and every one of you. I am so grateful for your support. And just a little plug into tomorrow's possible topic for tomorrow's podcast. Today is the one-year anniversary of when I announced the closure of the doe hook. So I'm going to spend the day reflecting on that. And maybe tomorrow's podcast will be all about uh how far I've come over the last year. And so stay tuned for that. I love you. Pray for me. I pray for you every single day, and we'll see you tomorrow. Bye.