Whether you peed in snowballs and chucked them at your friends or fed your unsuspecting vegetarian sister some meat, chances are your most embarrassing, tightly-held secrets are yearning for an audience.
That’s where United States artist Frank Warren comes in. He has hit upon an ingenious outlet for all those dirty little secrets we mischievously, or shamefully hide: write them down on an unsigned postcard and send them to him.
”In that simple act, I think it is possible to understand ourselves better and even to take actions, or change behaviors,” Warren told Agence France Presse from his home in Maryland.
In a little over a year since he put his idea to work, Warren has received about 20 000 secrets from strangers. The most interesting ones appear on his website, which so far has gotten more than 20-million hits.
”It’s a very wide variety of secrets. I get different kinds of secrets every day. It seems like secrets are inexhaustible,” he said.
”I used to pee into snowballs before throwing them at friends;” ”I’m jealous of her baby;” ”I fed my vegetarian sister beef for dinner;” ”I want to romp naked with the head children’s librarian,” is only a smattering.
The nameless disclosures deal with ”feelings of isolation, concerns about a loved one, feelings about a humiliating experience,” said Warren.
”Some of the secrets are funny. Some of the secrets talk about kindness … maybe somebody performed a kindness and was never discovered. Like the one who said, ‘Sometimes I put coins in other people’s parking meters.”’
Others give up more bawdy peccadillos: ”I exhibited myself nude at night in the window when trains passed. I loved it,” one postcard writer confessed.
There are work-related feelings of frustration, hopelessness: ”I’m stuck in a job I hate because I couldn’t pass a drug test in any other place. But I take drugs because I hate my job.”
Some are family-related: ”I haven’t spoken to my dad in ten years and it kills me everyday.”
Others defy description: ”I almost never wash my hands after going to the bathroom;” ”I steal small things from my friends to keep memories of how much I love them.”
A few speak to the disappointment of love: ”I wasted all my [birthday] wishes over you;” ”I knew before I married him that I would end up divorcing him. And I did;” ”I hated him for his depression. Maybe I’d rather be happy than in love.”
Warren embarked on his project in November 2004 with the aim of presenting the results at an art show in Washington. He printed 3 000 self-addressed postcards inviting strangers to write down something they did and had never confessed.
”I passed out these postcards to strangers at the metro, at restaurants, at art exhibitions. I left them between the pages of library books.
”And slowly they were discovered and they were completed and mailed back to me. And I’ve been receiving more and more secrets in the mail since November of 2004,” he said.
”Every day it’s still a joy to go to my mailbox and receive dozens of secrets from all over the world and to go through them.
”Some days I receive over a hundred. But even so, when I get to the last one I’m always disappointed, I always wish there were more”. – AFP