| "I can't poop in foreign countries," reads one of the many colourful postcards of the PostSecret art project. Another says, "I was sexually molested at the age of eight. I never told anyone. I'm 48 now. Thank you." Another: "I love my wife but sometimes I wish she would die in a car crash so I can start over with someone else without having to go through a divorce."
These are secrets that had never been shared with anyone before they were anonymously posted for everyone to read through PostSecret (postsecret.blogspot.com), an online cyber-confessional that is both hilarious and heartbreaking in its honesty. Anyone who wants to share an untold secret can write it on a four-by-six-inch postcard and send it to the home of a small-business owner in the U.S., who then scans the card and puts it online for the world to see.
"Looking at it in hindsight, I think the reason I might have come up with the project was because I had a secret of my own that I'd never told anybody for over 30 years, and maybe below my own awareness it was trying to get out," says Frank Warren, 41, from his home near Washington, D.C. "I didn't have the courage to share it alone, so I had to invite all these people to share their secrets with me first, and then I could anonymously share mine, too."
Since its launch last January, the PostSecret web page has received attention from all over the world – the site currently gets more than two million hits a month. And it's no wonder. The postcards create a wonderfully human tapestry of real life, full of messiness, beauty and colour. There is plenty of silliness, but there are also poignant confessions of hate and admissions of love. And there are things that most people think at some point, but would never share out loud.
"I get a lot of e-mails from people talking about how they've found it therapeutic or healing to not only mail in a postcard, but also to read the secrets that others are sharing," says Warren, who makes his daily bread by delivering medical documents.
Hundreds of postcards arrive in Warren's mailbox each week, and he reads all of them and puts the best ones on the site.
"I try and pick a representative sample of the cards I receive every week, and I really try and explore the full range of human emotion," says Warren. "The tragic, the funny, the sexual, the philosophical, the confused, the petty. All the parts of our humanity."
For Warren, the most interesting postcard spawned by the project is one that he has never even seen – it was never mailed to him. Someone e-mailed him and told him how they had gone out, bought a postcard, and then carefully expressed their secret on the card.
"They held it up thinking it would make them feel better to have expressed it and faced their secret, but the person said that when they held it up, they felt terrible. At that point they tore up the postcard and decided to change their life right then and not be the person who had that secret.
"For me, that illustrates what I hope this project is for people, and that is the opportunity not only to share a secret with others, but to… take ownership of that secret, the part of their life they've been hiding, and turn it into a positive."
The website has spawned a 288-page book that was released in November. PostSecret: Extraordinary Confessions from Ordinary Lives features a sampling of postcards that Warren has received.
Warren's wife is worried that they will be inundated with postcards into their retirement, but Frank's not too concerned. For now, he's content to be the trustworthy confidant of secret-keepers everywhere. He says it's a role that doesn't make him happy or bored – just gratified.
"Every time I'm downstairs working on the project, time disappears," he says. "I'm engulfed. It just grabs me and holds me." |
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