secrets

I'm a little bit obsessed with postsecret at the moment. It's a blog where people send in anonymous postcards with a secret written on one side - usually the picture side. They range from the silly and irreverent to the deeply personal and often confronting.

People confess to affairs, petty theft, lies, mistakes they've made, suicide attempts.
They also confess to random acts of kindness, decisions that have changed their lives for the better, fears about their futures.

It often worries me that there's no way of knowing who sends the postcards. I read one a few weeks ago that said "To the lady at the post office who liked my journal: it's full of suicide notes. You can have it when I'm gone." There's no way of knowing whether that person is still alive or not.

I sometimes feel bad for reading other people's secrets. Especially when they're so confronting. But that's kind of the point. The anonymity of the site means that people can express their deepest darkest secrets without fear of discovery. And there's something deeply theraputic about that. Why else do we keep diaries? Or write things on the back of toilet doors? And reading other people's secrets can be theraputic too. They can help you discover a secret you didn't know you had. Or were too afraid to express. Or just let you know you're not alone.

Anyway, I'm hooked.