Have you ever been told a secret, a really big secret? How’d you go, how long did you keep it, a day, a month, a year? What impact did keeping that secret have on you, your health, and your friendships? Okay well what about keeping half a million secrets? Can you imagine what it would be like to know the secrets of half a million people? That’s the problem faced by Frank Warren.
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PostSecret © 2013 The Ponder Room
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In January 2005 Frank began PostSecret as an experiment on Blogspot. People filled out a blank postcard and mailed it back to him anonymously. By 2007 he had 2,500 postcards. Now the community art project has 274,000 likes on facebook, 3.8k tweets and one room in Franks house has half a million secrets piled up against the wall.
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© 2013 The Ponder Room
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The other night he shared some of those secrets with the audience at Astor Theatre. Amongst the secrets were humorous messages like: telling your boss what you really think of him; declarations of long hidden love; food confessions; and embarrassing habits.
There were also examples of things that had backfired, like listening into a conversation in the hope of hearing one thing only to hear another. More insightful were the serious secrets of abuse, suicide and criminal activity. What would you do if you were on the receiving end of one of those postcards?
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© 2013 The Ponder Room
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The second part of the night was an open mike session where audience members were invited to share their secrets if they wanted to.
The evening took on a confession-like quality, harking back to Franks earlier years spent at church as a child.
I must admit I found this element of the evening unnerving. It’s one thing to share a secret with the world anonymously, it’s another thing to declare it in person. I don’t know how Frank does it, much later that night I was still pondering what happened to those who publicly confessed hefty secrets. Thankfully I hear that the project is linked to a suicide prevention service and I can only hope that these services were made available on the night.
It was fascinating night that left me pondering many things but mostly:
- Many of the secrets highlighted our innate desire to conform, to be accepted, to be seen as normal. I pondered what the secret-sharers lives would have been like if individualism was more widely accepted and not just tolerated, or in some cases laughed off as ‘eccentric’.
- Many of the secrets also reflected our strong desire for a sense of belonging, a sense of community … even if that community is based on secrets.
- The perils that can come with voicing a secret in the heat of the moment. Once opened it cannot be stuffed back into the box.
In a brilliant piece of marketing anyone who bought one of Franks books that night, could get it signed and he’d tell them a secret. Looking at the long queue I pondered whether everyone received the same secret, or if he had a limited number of secrets that got recycled. I guess that’s one secret I’ll never know.
For more information about the project, Franks books or to find out how to send a postcard go to http://www.postsecret.com
