Brandon Doman, founder of The Strangers Project, joins "CBS Mornings" to talk about his exhibit featuring handwritten stories from people around the world.

The strangers project is an ongoing initiative in Manhattan where visitors are encouraged to anonymously share their personal stories through handwritten letters. Founded by Brandon Doman, the project began with a simple invitation outside a coffee shop and has since grown to include over 100,000 stories collected at exhibits and schools across the country.

The permanent display in New York, funded by donations, attracts visitors from around the world. The stories, ranging from everyday moments to profound life lessons, reveal common threads of humanity and compassion. The project emphasizes that everyone has a story worth sharing, and that these shared experiences connect people across diverse backgrounds.

The Strangers Project shares powerful stories through pen and paper

The saying goes, if only walls could talk, well here at the strangers project exhibit in downtown Manhattan, they certainly do feel free to grab some merch. Just founder Brandon Doman took a simple idea from pen to paper and transformed it into a growing masterpiece of the shared human experience. A collection of anonymous handwritten letters that all answer the question. What's your story? The very first day I was doing this, I was just outside of a coffee shop watching people pass by. I took a marker and my notebook and I just wrote an invitation for people to sit and write something about their life. No big plan for it. But almost immediately these two women were walking by and they saw my little sign. They said, what are you doing? And I said, I'm not sure yet, but would you mind writing something about your life? 16 years later, Doman has collected over 100,000 stories in person at top up exhibits and schools across the country. Thank you so much for being a part of it. And this permanent display in new york, which is funded entirely by donations, gathers visitors from all across the world. How do you think that the act of writing something that's personal to them changes them at some level? You know, when I first invite people to write, one of the most common things I hear is they'll say some version of, oh, I'm not that interesting or my story wouldn't be like these ones on the wall. But these stories are from all those same people. And I think that's why these resonate so deeply with people. Even the short, silly ones is showing that these are the moments we live every day. So Doman took me around the room and a few particular letters caught my eye. I'm eight years old. I always get angry when I get angry. I stopped my feet and annoy everyone around me. But now I changed when I get angry. I just say stop bothering me and keep on doing what I was doing to be angry is okay. Just don't bother other people. It's a good life lesson. Yeah, it is a very good life lesson. This person writes about being raised in an ultra orthodox jewish family, wanting to get along but doesn't get along with people who say they love me. And at the end they say, I love you. I just don't love me. On the day we visited, a few dozen letters were submitted, including these that stood out. I always thought I'd end up dead by 18. My 19th birthday was yesterday and it genuinely has been a good one. Life is like a musical scoresheet. There are high notes and low notes. Life is made up of highs and lows. There cannot be happiness without sadness and there can never be light without darkness. However, that is what makes life beautiful. When you look up from this, if there is anyone near you, please smile at them and know we are all more alike than different. We all have the capacity for compassion. I was inspired to write my very own letter for the exhibit. But as tradition has it here, anonymity is key. So no peeking through all of the years of doing this. Is there a running theme, a thread that you've pulled and you've said this is representative of humanity? I think it's all of these are just telling the rest of the world like, hey, I'm here and I have something to say. And so it's going to come through in a million different topics in a million different ways. But I think all of these are just sort of reaching out to the world and just saying, we're all a part of this. I'm a part of this. Here's a little bit of what I have to say.

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