Postcard Confessional

March 3, 2006 — -- They came in by the thousands, and then tens of thousands: secrets describing shame, deception, romance, regret and childhood traumas, to name a few types. They were mailed on postcards to Frank Warren in a Maryland suburb.

"I get 100 to 200 every day," said Warren, a soft-spoken 41-year-old with a closely shaved, salt-and-pepper beard. "I've received over 25,000 postcards in about 14 months."

Warren solicited the postcards as part of a community arts project he started less than 18 months ago. He approached people in public places, handed them postcards pre-addressed to his project, and asked them to send him their secrets anonymously. The response was modest at first, but picked up speed when the concept spread by word of mouth and the Internet. When the exhibit was finally mounted, it was rated by a critic for The Washington Post as one of the five best art exhibits of 2005.

Admissions, Inhibitions and Plain Old Shame

Some of the postcards are lavishly illustrated. Warren has published more than 300 of them in a book, called "PostSecret."

"I think when you look at each postcard, it can almost act like a 6-inch-by-4-inch window into somebody's soul," he said. "They're allowing you to peek in and share something from their own life that they haven't been comfortable sharing with their closest friends and family."

One writer said, "I wish my parents could see me for what I am instead of what I didn't become." Another wrote, "I wish my father had forgiven me while he was still alive."

Many secrets have to do with self-image: "Sometimes I wish that I was blind just so I wouldn't have to look at myself every day in the mirror."

Loneliness is also a recurrent theme. "I know that sending in a stupid postcard to share a secret with a bunch of strangers won't do a damn thing to change the daily loneliness and unhappiness in my life. And I sent this anyway."

Warren keeps the postcards in a secure location.

"I have one secret in particular that I think of," he said. "The picture [on the postcard] was of a bedroom mirror with a frame around it, and a few personal items tucked in the corner. And the person had written, 'I steal small things from my friends to keep memories of how much I love them.' And for me, every time I read that, I react to it differently. Sometimes I think it's funny. Sometimes I think it's tragic, but it always sounds like somebody who's trying to work through the process of understanding something about themselves a little bit better. And it always sounds like poetry to me."

The Essential Question: 'To Reveal or Conceal'

"I think the reason that 'PostSecret' was so popular is that it was a way to confess," said psychiatrist Gail Saltz. "It was a way to sort of break the dam and get the secret out in the first place. "

Saltz, of the Weill-Cornell School of Medicine, is the author of a soon-to-be-published book called "Anatomy of a Secret Life: The Psychology of Living a Lie."

"The confessional has been, for ages and ages, so important because there is a relief and a release," she said. "Part of the relief is that you're not alone. And part of the relief is that somebody is therefore sharing something with you. And part of the relief is in understanding what it is about that secret that has made you feel ashamed and guilty for so long."

Saltz sums up the dilemma associated with secrets in a phrase: "To reveal or conceal, that is the question."

She said we start to keep secrets at around the age of 4, when children finally grasp that they can know things their parents don't know.

"They don't know that they can really withhold information until about that stage. Hence, that's when secrecy first takes place. Initially it's about possessions. And that's because developmentally, that's what's going on for them. What do I have? What don't I have? That's what matters most."

"It's as children mature, and hit those high school years, that relationships become the most important thing in terms of what they have and they don't have. And their secrets become about relationships."

A popular band, the All-American Rejects, worked the postcards from Warren's project into the video for a song called "Dirty Little Secrets," a Billboard Top 10 single in January. Warren says it generated an enormous response.

"I think that people who hold secrets are the people who don't have a lot of social power, whether that be young people, ethnic minorities, the gay and lesbian community. I think these are the folks who have these internal lives, sometimes, that are so rich, but they don't always get a chance to share them."

An important question, Saltz said, is how parents can talk with adolescent children without violating their secrets and still understand what they're going through.

"It is a fine line. This is the period of time, adolescence, when children do need to separate, and they do need to have more secrets. But the key is really that you let them know that you're always there to talk to, not to interrogate, not to get it out of their brain, but to be available so that they don't have to feel ashamed. Because that's when secrecy starts to become unhealthy. When a kid believes that you would shun them, you would turn your back on them, they therefore cannot tell you what's really going on."

Warren even wrote one of his own secrets on a postcard and mailed it to himself to see how he'd feel.

The secret, he said, "was a humiliating experience that took place when I was in the fourth grade. A charismatic boy moved into our neighborhood and convinced a few of my friends to pin me down and hold my eyelids open as they spit in my eyes.

"Strangely enough, as I look back on my life, from this point of view I'm glad that happened to me," he said. "And the reason why is because I feel like if it hadn't, this PostSecret project wouldn't have come about."

Warren doesn't collect secrets for a living. He runs a document delivery service. But the secrets he first envisioned simply as an art project won't stop coming in. And he now knows as well as anyone that they have a life all their own.

"People have asked me if it feels like a burden, and it doesn't," he said. "It feels like a gift. When I get to the last one, I always wish there was another one. I always wish there was one more."