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The Spokesman-Review Newspaper
Spokane, Washington  Est. May 19, 1883

Web site enables you to share your secrets with the world

Tom Feran Newhouse News Service

A secret is something you never tell anyone. Or tell one person at a time. Or would only tell a stranger.

Or might send to Frank Warren, America’s most trusted stranger.

“I tell people I was in the Gulf War, when in fact I have never served in the military.”

“I tell the other moms that I want another baby, but what I really want is another puppy!”

“I almost never wash my hands after using the toilet.”

Big secrets and little ones. Warren collects and shares them in a community art project called PostSecret, which he started last November at an arts festival in Washington, D.C.

He printed 3,000 postcards, asking people to share something with him that they had never told anyone before. He left the cards in subways, in stores, in libraries and invited people to mail them to him anonymously.

Slowly the secrets started finding their way to his mailbox.

“I trashed my parents house to look like I had a party … so my mom would think I had friends.”

“If I had a million dollars, I would give it all away for one more day with her like it used to be.”

“When I’m mad at my husband … I put boogers in his soup.”

One or two arrived each week, then one or two a day. Some looked like ransom notes. Others were elaborately illustrated. Warren, who lives in Maryland, was invited to display them in January at a gallery in Georgetown. The floodgates opened after he began sharing a selection of the cards, updated weekly, at PostSecret.com.

Now he gets a couple of dozen daily from all over the world, more than 4,000 in all. They’ve come from children as young as 7 and from men and women into their 70s, in French, Hebrew, “a Slavic language I couldn’t recognize” and Braille. He plans more gallery exhibitions, and a book is scheduled for December.

“My neighbor was making too much noise, so I cranked up the volume on the stereo. He came over and gave my teenage son (grief). I just stood there and never stood up for my son. I love my son. I’m sorry I did this. I can’t stop my tears as I write this. I’m 50 years old and will never forgive myself. I have never talked to my son about this.”

Warren, 41, calls himself an “accidental artist” because he has no formal training. Married and a father, he runs a business tracking medical research but now devotes more time to PostSecret. His art is selecting and arranging cards for his Web site — “trying to hit all the different notes in a song … take people on a journey,” he said.

“I do make judgments to select cards representative of what I received for the week and touch on different parts of shared experience. And I always try to pick a card that violates all the rules I have for picking.”

The cards share anguish, anger, fear, shame, sex, love, humor and even happiness. They can be heartbreaking or disturbing. Some of the most painful come with the most beautiful artwork, “and almost half have a message for me on the back, like, ‘Thank you so much, only you and I know this now.’ “

“Generally speaking,” Warren said, “I think secrets are feelings or beliefs that we feel isolate us from other people or make us different. So we’re reluctant to share them. When we’re exposed to other people’s secrets, we can develop a better relationship with the secrets within ourselves.”