Secret website gets a million hits a week
When Tina Malament was 17, she felt isolated and alone. Suffering from anorexia, depression, and suicidal thoughts, she lashed out at everyone close to her.
It took an intervention from family and friends for her to realize starving herself to be thin wasn't worth it. Over the next few years, she became serious about her recovery, and she took heart from a blog called PostSecret, where strangers mail in postcards to be posted online every Sunday. On the postcards, people anonymously share their secrets - funny secrets, happy secrets, and secrets filled with anguish, remorse, and pain. It is a place where people can release the secrets that suffocate them. About 1 million people visit the site each week.
The secrets posted on the site vary widely. One posted this month reads, "My mom won't tell me who my real father is. I wonder if she told him about me." Another, written on a business reply mail card, says, "These frustrate me so much I mail them back empty just to make them pay the postage!" A third reads: "I am so much bigger than the life I am leading."
Frank Warren, 43, of Germantown, Md., started the website three years ago. He dispersed 3,000 postcards throughout Washington, D.C., handing them out at Metro stations, leaving them at movie theaters, and tucking them into library books. On one side were instructions to share a secret and send it to Warren; the other side was blank. Warren had no artistic background, and at the time he wasn't even sure what he was doing or why he was doing it. Of the 3,000 postcards, 100 were mailed back. He created an art show out of them, and they were exhibited in Washington. One of the secrets made him recognize the power of anonymous secrets, and what had driven him to create it in the first place.
"I saw my secret, a secret that I hadn't really reconciled with myself, on a stranger's postcard mailed to me," said Warren. The secret described a humiliating childhood experience that had happened to the sender. When Warren read the postcard it reminded him of something that happened to him in fourth grade. The sender's courage gave him the strength to tell his wife and daughter about it for the first time.
Warren wrote his own secret on a postcard and mailed it to himself. He found the process healing. "I really feel as though my motive for starting PostSecret was a struggle with a secret in my own life that I couldn't reconcile with . . . through this process I was able to find peace with this secret," he said.
Many other people have also been able to recognize and release their own secrets when they see them posted on the website, whether they are on a postcard they mailed in themselves or a stranger's, Warren said.
Malament, now 21 and living in Colorado, sent in her own secret as well. She took a picture of herself standing in front of another postcard, which had a cupcake crossed out on it. She put her hands across the postcard and wrote across the picture that she was going to win her fight with anorexia. Although her secret wasn't posted, she found the process of making and sending it therapeutic, and the idea that someone else might read it and get something out of it encouraging.
PostSecret's ability to help people inspired Malament to start her own project. When she was a freshman at American University she made a T-shirt with a message about anorexia. On the front was a statistic about anorexics who die from the disorder. The back read: "I refuse to become a statistic." She wore the shirt around campus and eventually to a PostSecret event where Warren was speaking. At the end she stood up and told her story. Afterward six girls approached her crying and told her how much her story had affected them. They also asked her to make them T-shirts. Since she started the project she's sold about 50 shirts and has created several new designs.
Like Malament's, most of the secrets mailed to Warren fail to get posted online. Of the 1,000 secrets he receives every week, he only posts 20. He has received more than 175,000 so far.
Selecting the secrets isn't a science, he said, but he has some guidelines. The secret must feel authentic and resonate with him. He selects a wide variety of secrets so they reflect different aspects of humanity. He also arranges them in a way that tells a story.
Two postcards stand out to Warren in particular. One was of a picture of the World Trade Center after it was hit on 9/11. The postcard read: "Everyone who knew me before 9/11 believes I'm dead." The other, written on a
In addition to the website, Warren has created three books of secrets. Each book has a specific theme, such as "The Secret Lives of Men and Women," which focuses on the similarities and differences between the sexes. The secrets he publishes in the books have not been published on the website.
The fourth PostSecret book, "A Lifetime of Secrets," was published this month. The book, which contains postcards from people of all ages, focuses on secrets that people have in different stages of life.
Although there have been talks about a PostSecret documentary - and new innovations such as audio secrets, videos, and discussion forums - Warren said it is important for him to preserve the integrity of the project. He won't allow any advertising, although he has received some very lucrative offers, he said. Warren ranked No. 14 on Forbes's 2007 list of the 25 biggest, brightest, and most influential people on the Internet.
Everyone has a secret that would break your heart if you knew it, Warren said. If everyone understood that, he said, there would be more compassion in the world.
"[PostSecret] really revealed this whole hidden landscape that we all share that people don't talk about," he said. "There is an artist inside all of us. Courage is sometimes more important than creativity in creating art that can really last and move us."
