PostSecret

This guy comes up with an idea for an art installation - he leaves about 4000 blank postcards all over the place, with an invitation for the person to write a secret on it and post it back to him. Out of the few hundred he got back, an internet and publishing juggernaut has emerged. Thousands of people have sent him their deepest, darkest, most joyful, or just plain made-up secrets.

I just finished reading two of the collections. All of them, sad, funny, happy, weird - all have the same feel to them, the same weak flickering in the darkness of anonymity. I wonder how many of these people were just hoping to get a place on his blog or in one of his books, and how many of them just needed a confessor. There are a dozen knock offs of Frank Warren's vision, but they seems to have left the original undiluted - people are still sending their pain and triumphs (mostly pain) along to Frank for him to show the world.

I don't know. Is it really telling your secret if you tell it so that no one ever knows that it's yours? So many angsting teenagers, so much self-hatred, so many unhappy wives...reading through one of the books is quite the existential wallop. The main thing that comes through is the impression of all of us as tiny, struggling, creatures, all singing along to the same howl, none of us hearing one another.

I understand the impulse, I really do. When I was really down I would go into my bedroom when no one was home and scream into the pillow. The internet makes an even better venting space - the proliferation of LJ and Myspace can tell you that much. I suppose what makes PostSecret special is that you are absolutely guaranteed at least one audience member - Frank reads everything people send, even if it doesn't make it onto the blog or into a book. I can't imagine what it is like for him to read them all, to sift through and try to make a choice about which is published and which is not. All those howling songs, each unique, each exactly the same...

I sent him one, once.