TAYLOR TIPPETT

LEAVES WORDS ON THE WINDOW SEAT

Meet Taylor. She spends much of her life in the sky taping notes to plane windows to brighten people’s day. 

It all started back in 2014 when she was in a season of struggle. She was nursing a heartbreak and suffering from anxiety and depression. She had moved to a new city where she was living with a family who couldn't speak English, hadn’t yet made any friends there, and had just started her new job.

“I was experiencing so many deep levels of sadness,” she said. “Life was a category five hurricane.”

One day on an empty, early morning flight, Taylor sat up the back of the plane. Out her window was a rich orange sunrise. She says it should have blown her mind, but her mind was busy elsewhere — cycling through negative thoughts that had become pretty standard. But this time she pulled herself up. She got out her journal where she had been writing positive things to hold onto throughout the day. She began to write what she wished someone would say to her. When she finished, she thought,

“If I needed to hear this, maybe someone else does too.”

Taylor got a smaller piece of paper off one of the aisle carts and wrote on it: ’be kind to yourself.’ She stuck the note on a window, took a photo, and pulled down the blind, leaving it there for someone else to find.

That was the beginning of what was then coined ‘Words from the Window Seat’.

Over the following months, Taylor continued to leave notes on the windows and in the seat pockets. Either of things she needed to hear or words someone had shared with her. It was a very inexpensive thing. Her notebook was probably a dollar. The tape was free. Yet she took what little she had and she used it to to encourage whoever she could.

She posted a photo online of her first note and received a surprising amount of attention. It wasn’t long until #wordsfromthewindowseat was a trending hashtag. Passengers from everywhere started sharing their stories and scrawling sweet notes from their seat. Thousands and thousands of notes have since been put on plane windows with the hope to tell another person that they’re not alone in whatever they’re going through. 

“The little words and things matter and our stories matter,” Taylor said.

Though she wasn’t in a good place when she first started working, her love for words and people sparked her interest in becoming a flight attendant. 

Most of us are under the impression that it’s a very glamorous job (maybe that’s due to their slick buns or Gwyneth Paltrow’s rom-com), but Taylor will tell you not that flash. It’s a lot of vomit, spills, and dealing with people who think their tray tables are their coffee tables at home. It’s serving pretzels and diet cokes and holding every baby and dog that comes on board. Not to mention, her body is forever confused, and she doesn’t get a lot of sleep. 

But when she was deciding what she wanted to do, she was on the hunt for something that would allow her to love people who were hard to love. You might never have guessed those people to be the ones up in the air on an adventure to somewhere. But have you seen how people can act on planes? How demanding they can get? How people turn when they’re lacking sleep and are all cramped up? Travelling is a luxury, but people can become their worst selves when they travel. Becoming a flight attendant was a field Taylor could practice what she was passionate about.

“We are all fighting hard battles and people need to know that they’re not alone.” And so with each passenger, no matter what mood they come on board with, she says to them, “I’m here to serve you and keep you alive and make you smile.” 

And that’s Taylor. She gets a badge because — though her job could be ordinary, demanding and frustrating — she shows up to each flight with a purpose: to make people feel loved, heard and cared for. The notes on the windows are a small reflection of that. 

“You can really make someone’s day with something as simple as a handwritten note,” she said.