“My Secret” is a collection of colorful (literally) confessions from everyday people, submitted anonymously through the project known as PostSecret. People are free and encouraged to send in artfully crafted postcards with short descriptions of the truths of their lives that they are otherwise embarrassed or ashamed to admit.
By Joel Brown
Staff Writer
“My Secret” is a collection of colorful (literally) confessions from everyday people, submitted anonymously through the project known as PostSecret. People are free and encouraged to send in artfully crafted postcards with short descriptions of the truths of their lives that they are otherwise embarrassed or ashamed to admit.
There is a vast spectrum of content and respective moods. On the embarrassing end, there is a full two-page spread of someone’s postcard who “Used to think that the Sistine Chapel was called the Sixteenth Chapel.” Another humorous submission is, “I recorded my cat on a mini cassette and hid it in the school library on ‘play.'”
Without any hint or warning, as there is no narrative or commentary between the slew of images, some of the cards take a deep plunge into people’s deepest and darkest secrets that they have not been able to confess other than in the anonymous collection of PostSecret. The project’s creator, Frank Warren, has noticed throughout his work that the young submitters stand out since their passions run deeper.
Loneliness is a recurring topic, from the “9,898 students and I have never felt more alone,” to the heartbreaking, “If I died, no one would notice,” to the wilder than fiction, “I kept the letter your boyfriend wrote for you and put it in my room so someone might find it and think that someone is in love with me.”
For others, ongoing feelings or reactions are the material that they find an outlet for, with postcards like, “I’m afraid to live a Christian life because I might miss out on all the fun,” and, “I sleep to escape.”
Also interesting is the fact that some leave the specifics so vague that they are nonexistent to the stranger across the country who is reading the book, as in a postcard featuring Mona Lisa peeking through window blinds with the text, “You think I don’t but I know,” suggesting that mere expression, regardless of an audience is the primary personal psychological need and lends itself to healing.
Readers frequently tell Warren that it helps when their own unacknowledged secrets are revealed in someone else’s card. Thus, Frank also devotes a page in his book to his discovery that, “Sometimes when we think we are keeping a secret, that secret is actually keeping us.”