Oddity Central

Oddity Central

Woman Turns to Serial Hugging to Cure Homesickness

Posted: 18 Jul 2012 01:15 PM PDT


After moving to the big city, Melinda Schmidt looked for a way to connect with people like she did with her friends and family back home, and found hugging helped. So she hugged total strangers every day, for a whole year.

It’s tough moving to the city after you’ve spent all your life in a small community where everyone was close, and young Melinda Schmidt found that out the hard way. She was feeling homesick, so she vowed to hug a new person every day, for an entire year, to help her get over her feelings. Only hugging quickly became a way of life, and although her pledged 365 days are up, she continues hugging total strangers. ’I won’t ever stop doing this. I won’t ever stop hugging strangers and people who I’ve just met because it’s a complete lifestyle change,” she says in a video shot to showcase her bizarre habit.

Melinda Schmidt 550x356 Woman Turns to Serial Hugging to Cure Homesickness

What Melinda is doing sounds pretty innocent, but would you agree to hug a total stranger if they came over and asked you? Not everyone would, but she’s lucky she has a lovely smile that seems to convince even the most reluctant folks to ultimately give-in to her warm embrace. As you can see in the video, the North Carolina woman just goes up to people and asks if she can give them a hug. Some are a bit suspicious of her motives at first, but they agree in the end. Usually she picks people who are having a bad day, and says she can see the difference a hug makes right away. “All that stress kind of melts away”, she says. “In those moments I feel like a millionaire who’s giving away their riches to somebody that really needs it.”

 

And now that she’s found a way to connect with people in the big city, Melinda is not thinking of stopping anytime soon. “Hugging has become a part of my life,” the young woman says. “It feels so good, I just couldn’t stop now.”

For more about Melinda’s serial hugging, check out her blog, My Year of Hugs.

Woman Turns to Serial Hugging to Cure Homesickness was originally posted at OddityCentral.com

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