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LEVI PRICE / Scroll
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“What’s your deepest, darkest secret?” That question isn’t just being asked at 12-year-olds’ slumber parties. It’s being asked by a regular guy and the answers are being shared with the world.
Frank Warren, an average suburban husband and “accidental artist” as he calls himself, started a community art project in Washington, D.C. in which he scattered 3,000 postcards with his address and an invitation to send a deep secret and some sort of artistic visual back to him on a postcard.
After the initial project, PostSecret boomed into multiple publications that exhibit the “confessors” postcards. These publications include www.postsecret.blogspot.com, a book titled PostSecret: Extraordinary Confessions from Ordinary Lives and My Secret: a PostSecret Book, released on Oct. 24. The postcards were even featured on the All-American-Rejects’ music video for their song Dirty Little Secret.
“Frank experienced an emotional crisis in his life. Developing a passion for postcard art projects was how he worked through it. It became his personal experience of healing through art,” said Anne C. Fisher, a psychologist, artist and friend of Warren, in PostSecret: Extraordinary Confessions from Ordinary Lives’ foreword.
What started out as a simple project and attempt at self-therapy turned the “average suburban husband” to the “most trusted man in America,” as Warren is called in the title of the foreword of his first book.
But not everyone puts all of their trust in Warren and PostSecret.
“I’d be afraid that someone would figure out that it was me. They probably wouldn’t because it’s anonymous… but still. I probably wouldn’t [send in my secret],” said Kathryn Lindenlaub, a freshman from Goodyear, Ariz.
However, numerous physiologists have said that sharing secrets helps a person’s mental health.
“PostSecret is even briefer than the briefest of psychotherapies. The healing experience in PostSecret is bite-size, manageable,” Fisher said.
But not all physiologists are as excited about this form of therapy.
“I would be a little cautious,” said Tom Rane, a child development professor in the Department of Home and Family. “There is certainly therapeutic value in sharing secrets, but it is more valuable at a personal level.”
Rane attributes the popularity of PostSecret to society’s want for a “quick fix.”
“But if that’s all you’ve got, I guess that’s alright,” Rane said.
No matter one’s reservations, the invitation is still there. Warren’s Web site, www.postsecret.blogspot.com, says: “You are invited to anonymously contribute your secrets to PostSecret. Each secret can be a regret, hope, funny experience, unseen kindness, fantasy, belief, fear… confession or childhood humiliation. Reveal anything—as long as it is true and you have never shared it with anyone before.”
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