By Amanda Balionis
“When my fiancée left me, I volunteered to go to Iraq hoping I wouldn’t come back. I got the purple heart instead.” This statement will remain faceless, nameless and without explanation to anyone who stumbles upon it. Thousands have probably already read it. In exactly one week from the Sunday it was posted, that living secret will be gone.
PostSecret.com is a Web site that allows people from all over the world to let out their deepest and most private secrets in complete anonymity in a safe and artistic environment. The secrets range from thoughts of suicide to sexual fantasies. As the founder of Post Secret, Frank Warren, says, out of the 1,000 secrets he receives every month he posts the top 20 that, “…surprise him and represent the full emotional spectrum.”
It’s not just the statement that Warren finds most intriguing, but the way in which the keepers of the secrets pictorially portray their feelings. Each sender will make a homemade postcard that has their secret on the front and is also decorated to represent the emotions of that person. The pictures and artistry are brimming with as much emotion as the words themselves creating what Warren describes as an “art project, first and foremost.”
This art project, which is now one of the largest advertisement-free blog sites on the Web, started more as an experiment for Warren rather than what it has become: a large community of people coming together to release a secret they’ve been holding inside.
About three years ago, Warren, a social science major who graduated from Berkeley, decided to perform his own social experiment in Washington D.C.
“What better place to look for secrets, right?” Warren asks. “I passed out about 3,000 self -addressed postcards and asked people to write down something true and something they’d never told anyone.”
Warren received about 100 secrets back, and thought the experiment was over at that point. “All of a sudden, I started receiving self-made postcards from Texas and Florida and Canada…word of this experiment had spread virally.”
Today, Warren has taken the postcards to a new level. He released a book, “A Lifetime of Secrets,” a compilation of homemade postcards and admissions of fear, guilt, pride and love that people have never told anyone else. The book, like the Web site, has been an instant hit.
Warren travels around the nation talking to audiences full of people who have shared their secrets or have been touched by what they read.
Like the thousands Warren travels to talk to (the majority of his audience being college students), Warren himself has been affected by the experience of reading peoples deepest secrets. “I learned that we all have a secret that would break others’ hearts if we knew what it was.”
PostSecret.com is a neutral, objective area for people to realize that they aren’t alone with the way they are feeling and the things they’ve done. Warren has done more than just create a blog phenomenon, he has created a place for people to help others and themselves in a completely safe environment.
Warren and several postcards submitted to Post Secret . (Frank Warren)
Warren’s book, A Lifetime of Secrets. (Frank Warren)