Do you feel the urge to reveal your deepest, darkest secrets? If you do, you are not alone. Thousands of people have revealed their secrets on a web site called PostSecret.com. According to Technorati, PostSecret.com is the seventh most popular blog on the internet as of August 1, 2006. What is PostSecret? It’s a web site that invites you to anonymously reveal your secrets. The directions are simple:
“Each secret can be a regret, hope, funny experience, unseen kindness, fantasy, belief, fear, betrayal, erotic desire, feeling, confession, or childhood humiliation. Reveal anything - as long as it is true and you have never shared it with anyone before.”
Create a 4-by-6-inch postcard and draw, paint, or cut and paste whatever you desire to reveal your secret. Then anonymously mail to it to Frank Warren, the artist behind the project. Every Sunday, he puts the postcards on his web site. Sometimes disturbing, sometimes funny, and sometimes sad, it’s hard not to feel a wide range of emotions when reading the submissions. The skeptic in me ponders if the secrets are really secrets at all. But the artist in me knows that it really doesn’t matter if the person is telling the truth or not. We all have secrets. We all have something we hide about ourselves. It’s the choice to reveal what we want to the world that makes us who we are. And reading the submissions reveals more about us than it does the person who submitted it. It should remind us all that we have our own secrets to deal with.
