Decrepit Old Fool

Illinois State University hosted a talk by Frank Warren, the Post Secret guy.  Over the years, half a million people have written their secrets on postcards and mailed them to his home.  He puts them on his website, and publishes some of them as books.  Profits from the book sales go to a foundation that helps prevent suicide.  I think he makes his living from speaking engagement fees.

He started the project with no idea that it would grow into a worldwide phenomenon, or that it would change his life.  It began as an art project.  People tell him things they’ve never told anyone before.  Sometimes awful things, sometimes wonderful things.  He is known as “the world’s most trusted stranger” and has heard more private secrets, it is said, than any other living person.

He’s been deeply changed by the experience.  He is not a polished orator, but he’s learned some truths from the suffering and hopes of so many people.  Far from becoming cynical or depressed, he has embraced the shared experience and its uplifting potential for individuals and society.

There are two kinds of secrets, he says; those you keep from others and those you keep from yourself.  There must be a lot of overlap in those groups, though many people carry secrets that are obvious to everyone but them.

Those who have been mistreated by the world, he said, are likely to grow up and change it.  (That’s from memory; if anyone remembers the exact quote, please share it in the comments.)

He has learned that secrets are corrosive, because they make us terribly lonely.  If any lesson can be learned from that mountain of post cards, it is that the awful secret you carry is something human, something you share with far more people than you might imagine.  And in the strenuous work of hiding it, they feel awfully lonely too.

Our culture discourages disclosure.  Something in a fearful society recoils from the truth of cruelty, from the pain of individual minds, from the suffering caused by that which cannot be said. 

People harboring suicidal thoughts have written to Frank to say that his work has helped them realize they are not alone in their feelings, and it took a huge burden off their shoulders.

Certainly our culture (and this is hardly unique to our culture) has managed to turn sex, which should be a happy part of the human experience, into an almost universal wellspring of self-doubt and shame.  This is tragedy enough, but it is often compounded with other suffering and even death.

Depression is so common as to be almost universal; how have we made it something to be hidden, giving it such awful (and undeserved) power?  If you aren’t smiling, strangers are likely to tell you that you should smile.  It’s a state of mind, not a sin, and sometimes a creative state of mind at that. 

Religion, or the lack of it, encloses secrets as well.  A billboard campaign reassures atheists that if you don’t believe in God, you are not alone.  This kind message has been bitterly opposed as hate speech by the chronically over-religious, who threaten everything from vandalism to boycotts to eternity in hell to suppress the message.

A close relative once advised me never to disclose publically that I am an atheist.  In a religion-saturated culture, she was afraid it would cost me friends or a job.  (Neither has happened, fortunately.  But in fact, I do avoid discussing religion with people I know to be sensitive on the subject.)

Part of the program is a time when audience members take the microphone and reveal some secret.  These were not trivial revelations; one had slept in a closet all his life and was amazed by the size of his dorm room.  Another had been raped, but felt liberated by the charges against her rapist being dropped because she wouldn’t have to face him.

Warren said he never knows how to end his talk, because it doesn’t really have an ending. 

• Visit his website, postsecret.com. 

• You can also find out more by reading the Wikipedia article.
• Here’s a video of Warren at University of Pittsburgh