Letters to Janet

Kari Anderson, of the Howard Bloom Institute, feels that if you are a teenager lost in depression and mired in a sense of helplessness, what she calls “the Janet letters” can get you out of it. Even if you’re an adult who feels useless to the world, the Janet letters, she thinks, can give you new hope. Why?

When I was sixteen years old I was in a state of clinical depression. Which means I was depressed every waking second of the day. But I was working for the summer as a lab assistant at the biggest cancer research institute in the world at the time—The Roswell Park Memorial Cancer Research Institute in my hometown of Buffalo, NY.

I was also madly in love with the girl next door, Janet Oestreich, who looked on me as nothing but a friend. Or a flea. Janet, who was also sixteen, went to Europe for a six week tour of all of the greatest classical music festivals in the world, from Spoleto to Bayreuth. I was heartbroken. So I wrote Janet at least one letter every day. And since I am inept at handwriting, I typed every one of them.

That was the summer in which I came up with a new theory that explains the beginning, middle, and end of the universe. A theory that predicted and explained dark energy 38 years before astronomers discovered it was for real. ( See the video on “The Big Bagel” )

Kari Anderson says, “Look at Howard. He’s one of the happiest people on earth. His life delivers a message. You can be drowning in misery, but if you hang in there, if you persist, you can escape the darkness of depression. And even if you’re sixteen and no one takes you seriously, you can make contributions that are monumental.”

That, Kari believes, is the message of the Janet Letters.