PostSecret unites us through shared secrets
By Lindsey Rivait
Arts
Editor
October 7, 2009
 PostSecret is an ongoing community mail art project where individuals create postcard-sized works of art on which they confess a secret.
Approximately 1.5 million visitors begin their Sunday mornings looking through 20 secrets, ranging from molestation, adultery, and abuse to humorous or embarrassing, and some confessing the sender’s hopes and dreams.
PostSecret: Confessions on Life, Death, and God, released Oct. 6, is the fifth PostSecret book from creator Frank Warren, who is now busy putting on PostSecret events at college campuses.
The new book was born from an exhibit called “All Faiths Beautiful” Warren was asked to be a part of by the American Visionary Art Museum. Warren submitted 200 postcards containing spiritually-based secrets.
Warren says the cards include secrets about private fears or hopes or personal religious thoughts, things people might not share with anybody else. “Or just the kind of things you might feel uncomfortable telling to other members of your congregation. Or, maybe you’re an atheist and there’s issues there as well,” he explained.
The secrets posted each Sunday are living secrets. Warren does not archive the postcards on the website.
“What I’m trying to do is convey the immediacy of those secrets. When you go there Sunday, you know when you read a postcard, somebody is carrying that burden right at the moment you read it. I think that makes it a more intense experience that way,” he explained.
For the observant readers, Warren hides Easter eggs on the site and through other social networking sites PostSecret takes advantage of, such as Twitter. “I try to do new things with the project all the time, but I don’t write about them or talk about them,” he said.
One such Easter egg includes scrolling over some of the secrets posted on Sundays to reveal the other side of the postcard.
To date, Warren has received almost 500,000 postcards and he keeps every one of them. “I think they’re very precious,” he added.
With the sheer volume of mail coming in for Warren, he has developed a special relationship with his mail carrier, Kathy. “I think I’m the only person on her route that keeps a tab at the post office,” he laughed. “She treats the postcards very special, almost like not just secrets, but sacred. I think it’s no accident that she’s the carrier,” he continued.
Warren’s favourite part of the job is travelling to different college campuses to share the stories behind the secrets, as well as showing banned secrets—unable to be published in PostSecret books because of content, copyright, or privacy issues.
One such banned postcard depicts Donald Trump. “It says, ‘Everybody knows I wear a hairpiece, but I’m too afraid to admit it myself.’ That would be an example of a postcard that the publisher probably wouldn’t want to publish in the book,” laughed Warren.
One of the requirements for mailing in a postcard is that the sender must share a secret they’ve never told anyone else before, leaving Warren as the first person to read the secrets sent in—a heavy and stressful experience for anyone.
“I think doing it everyday, I’ve changed as a person through this project so I am able to carry some of those heavier burdens or help share them,” said Warren.
Many of the secrets Warren receives are similar, showing that our secrets work more to unite us than anything.
Warren receives two types of common secrets—ones that deal with the journey to find that one person we can tell all of our secrets to, and the other—“I pee in the shower.”
“You kind of have two extremes there of the human condition,” he said.
One of the weirdest secrets Warren has received came in the mail recently. “I got one last week from somebody who shared a secret about peeing in somebody’s bong water when they were out of the room. That was pretty peculiar,” he said.
Although Warren requests that the secrets sent in be true, making up secrets isn’t such a terrible thing in terms of PostSecret’s goals.
“I think it’s possible that people may think they’re making up a secret, but actually, at a deeper level, it’s coming from this kernel of truth. Perhaps some of the most meaningful secrets come from people who believe they’re making them up, but at a deeper level, they’re truly solid,” he explained.
Warren’s project is involved with suicide prevention, a cause dear to Warren who has volunteered at suicide prevention hotlines since he was in college.
“When PostSecret got crazy popular and millions of people started coming to the website every month, I knew I wanted to use that kind of visibility to promote not only 1-800-SUICIDE, but also to help raise funds for Hopeline,” he said. In the five years that PostSecret has been around, the PostSecret community has raised over $500,000 for Hopeline.
Visit PostSecret at postsecret.blogspot.com every Sunday for 20 new secrets.
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