More than a million people around the world have told Frank Warren their deepest secrets. People have mailed him confessions, disappointments and their hopes for the future.
They do not tell Warren who they are.
Warren shows his favourite postcards online and in exhibits. And he shares them with people in popular presentations.
Here are some examples:
“Dear birth mother: I have great parents. I found love. I’m happy.”
“I give decaf to customers who are rude to me.”
“Everyone who knew me before 9/11 believes I’m dead.”
Experiment
10 years ago Warren began what he thought would be a small social experiment. “I wanted to find out if people had secrets and if they did, if they’d share them with me. So I printed 3,000 postcards with my home address on one side and a blank space for them to write down a secret, something they’d never told anyone before, and decorate the card with artwork and mail it to my home.”
Many people wrote their secrets on the card and mailed them to him.
Warren put some of them on his website, postsecret.com, and published some of them in books.
Soon people from Ireland, Japan, South Africa, the United Kingdom, Greenland and Australia were writing their secrets on their own postcards and mailing them to him in different languages.
“10 years later I’ve received over a million and they keep coming.”
Warren reads, and keeps, every single postcard. “I believed that if I could create a safe, non-judgmental place where people could share these hidden fantasies and fears and hopes, desires, humiliations and funny stories, it could really be something special.”
He calls the project “PostSecret.”
More than half a million postcards from the project are shown at the Smithsonian National Postal Museum in Washington. Emily Murgia works at the museum. She says: “People love this exhibit. It’s full of people who will stay here for hours, reading postcard to postcard. People will smile at some, laugh, we see people crying. They find a piece of themselves inside these secrets.”
“Seems like no matter what continent, no matter what language, the secrets are sharing the same fears, the same hopes, the same desires. And for me it’s a privilege that so many people from around the world have trusted me with their deepest and true secrets.”
And here are some more examples:
“Jail isn’t anything like the movies.”
“Inside this envelope is the ripped-up remains of a suicide note I didn’t use. I feel like the happiest person on Earth now.”
This is one of Frank Warren's favourites:
“When people I love leave voicemails on my phone I always save them in case they die tomorrow, and I have no other way of hearing their voice ever again.”
