Digging up what lurks beneath...
It goes like this...
One dark and stormy night about five years ago, a Mormon boy leaves home on a quest to "find himself." A few months after the trip begins, he finds himself in love...with a man. Unable to tell his family, he cuts off the affair and returns home. But as Kelis would say, sometimes "there's no turning back." So the closeted Mormon boy takes out an index card, colors it with all the shades of the rainbow, and writes, "I wish I weren't a gay Mormon, but I am" on the front. He mails it to a guy he's heard speak on the radio. Frank. Frank posts the anonymous card on his website.
Or sometimes like this:
500 well-dressed guests are taking turns toasting the bride and groom. The maid of honor stands up, giving everyone a chance to admire her pea-green bridesmaid dress, and begins, "I knew Lindsey had found love when..." but the entire time all she can think about is the fact that she slept with the groom...in the bathroom of a hotel...at the rehearsal dinner...a week ago. And unable to expurgate her overwhelming sense of guilt, she slips into the ladies during the reception, takes an index card out of her beaded purse, and writes, "I am so sorry for betraying my best friend" across the front. She addresses it to Frank, and drops it in the mail.
Frank collects these anonymous confessions and makes public art out of them. These posters demonstrate the power of secrets, he says in his lectures and speeches, to limit and transform. When I imagine the scenarios behind these postcards, I come up with scenes that read like outtakes from Desperate Housewives. But I'm being facetious, because the first time I heard about Frank's project, I was deeply moved.
I was in Barnes and Noble when I found the recently published PostSecret book, full of these strange, bizarre and intimate sentences. I settled down with a coffee and opened the book on my lap. I felt I was being sucked further and further into the twilight zone. About half of these urgent secrets involve sex, another quarter involve theft, and the final quarter (the most interesting) involve no combination of the other two. Nonetheless, these secrets are ordinary. There's obviously no postcard that reads, "I regret invading the Rhineland" or "I killed my mistress and her lover" or even "I inflated my company's stock prices and made millions raiding my workers' pension funds." It's along the lines of, "I sabotage my mother's relationships because I don't want her to fall in love again" or "I haven't told my family that I converted to Catholicism" or "I'm finally passionately in love with someone but I can't tell him because he's engaged."
When you share a secret, Frank suggests in the intro, you become more, rather than less, powerful. I thought, hell, there's no time like the present (I was in Barnes and Noble on a Sunday afternoon, there really was no time like the present) and so, lacking index cards, I took out a sheet of notebook paper and tried to phrase my various important secrets in single-sentence form. The power here is summary: most secrets don't need background or explanation. When boiled down, we're all keeping the same things to ourselves (how ironic!) But here's the funny part: after I had filled three or four notebook pages with one-line secrets, I tucked the paper into my bag and went home. I didn't feel better, but I figured maybe that was because I hadn't mailed any of them yet. Two days later, going through my bag, I remembered those sheets and reached for them. They were gone! I lost my most important confessions, the secrets of my soul, etc etc! Let them slip out of my purse like junk mail. (And then I remembered that one of my secrets was, I'm a horrible flake and lose things all the time, but I want everyone to think I have it together. Ha.) I started wondering who had found them, where they had ended up, whether they were all together.
But my fears proved baseless. I didn't get any letters from long-lost friends, no reprimands from family members, no knowing looks from strangers on the street. The truth is, my roommate, the janitor, someone probably picked up my papers, read a few lines, thought, what the hell? and dumped them in the trash. The so-called secrets of my soul have likely been recycled into napkins at Cosi's.
I think the real secret is this: although some secrets have the power to transform our lives, most don't. The fact is, you can send yourself out into the world and get nothing back, because (and I'm not trying to be sad or pathetic, just honest) most people have their own business to attend to.
In a way, it's almost reassuring.
One dark and stormy night about five years ago, a Mormon boy leaves home on a quest to "find himself." A few months after the trip begins, he finds himself in love...with a man. Unable to tell his family, he cuts off the affair and returns home. But as Kelis would say, sometimes "there's no turning back." So the closeted Mormon boy takes out an index card, colors it with all the shades of the rainbow, and writes, "I wish I weren't a gay Mormon, but I am" on the front. He mails it to a guy he's heard speak on the radio. Frank. Frank posts the anonymous card on his website.
Or sometimes like this:
500 well-dressed guests are taking turns toasting the bride and groom. The maid of honor stands up, giving everyone a chance to admire her pea-green bridesmaid dress, and begins, "I knew Lindsey had found love when..." but the entire time all she can think about is the fact that she slept with the groom...in the bathroom of a hotel...at the rehearsal dinner...a week ago. And unable to expurgate her overwhelming sense of guilt, she slips into the ladies during the reception, takes an index card out of her beaded purse, and writes, "I am so sorry for betraying my best friend" across the front. She addresses it to Frank, and drops it in the mail.
Frank collects these anonymous confessions and makes public art out of them. These posters demonstrate the power of secrets, he says in his lectures and speeches, to limit and transform. When I imagine the scenarios behind these postcards, I come up with scenes that read like outtakes from Desperate Housewives. But I'm being facetious, because the first time I heard about Frank's project, I was deeply moved.
I was in Barnes and Noble when I found the recently published PostSecret book, full of these strange, bizarre and intimate sentences. I settled down with a coffee and opened the book on my lap. I felt I was being sucked further and further into the twilight zone. About half of these urgent secrets involve sex, another quarter involve theft, and the final quarter (the most interesting) involve no combination of the other two. Nonetheless, these secrets are ordinary. There's obviously no postcard that reads, "I regret invading the Rhineland" or "I killed my mistress and her lover" or even "I inflated my company's stock prices and made millions raiding my workers' pension funds." It's along the lines of, "I sabotage my mother's relationships because I don't want her to fall in love again" or "I haven't told my family that I converted to Catholicism" or "I'm finally passionately in love with someone but I can't tell him because he's engaged."
When you share a secret, Frank suggests in the intro, you become more, rather than less, powerful. I thought, hell, there's no time like the present (I was in Barnes and Noble on a Sunday afternoon, there really was no time like the present) and so, lacking index cards, I took out a sheet of notebook paper and tried to phrase my various important secrets in single-sentence form. The power here is summary: most secrets don't need background or explanation. When boiled down, we're all keeping the same things to ourselves (how ironic!) But here's the funny part: after I had filled three or four notebook pages with one-line secrets, I tucked the paper into my bag and went home. I didn't feel better, but I figured maybe that was because I hadn't mailed any of them yet. Two days later, going through my bag, I remembered those sheets and reached for them. They were gone! I lost my most important confessions, the secrets of my soul, etc etc! Let them slip out of my purse like junk mail. (And then I remembered that one of my secrets was, I'm a horrible flake and lose things all the time, but I want everyone to think I have it together. Ha.) I started wondering who had found them, where they had ended up, whether they were all together.
But my fears proved baseless. I didn't get any letters from long-lost friends, no reprimands from family members, no knowing looks from strangers on the street. The truth is, my roommate, the janitor, someone probably picked up my papers, read a few lines, thought, what the hell? and dumped them in the trash. The so-called secrets of my soul have likely been recycled into napkins at Cosi's.
I think the real secret is this: although some secrets have the power to transform our lives, most don't. The fact is, you can send yourself out into the world and get nothing back, because (and I'm not trying to be sad or pathetic, just honest) most people have their own business to attend to.
In a way, it's almost reassuring.
posted by Anika at 7:46 AM
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