dirty little secrets...











Imagine your deepest, darkest secret. Imagine that you couldn't tell a soul. Now imagine a website that can display your secret anonymously for the world to see. There is such a website, PostSecret, and has been my online obsession for years.

I look forward to checking the website every Sunday to indulge in the new postcards. The concept and rules are simple: “You are invited to anonymously contribute your secrets to PostSecret. Each secret can be a regret, hope, funny experience, unseen kindness, fantasy, belief, fear, betrayal, erotic desire, feeling, confession, or childhood humiliation. Reveal anything - as long as it is true and you have never shared it with anyone before.”

I highly recommend checking out PostSecret immediately by visiting http://postsecret.blogspot.com/ or clicking here. The site publishes new postcards every Sunday as well as posts emailed comments about specific cards through out the week. (My only gripe is there are no archives to the site so once a new week’s secrets are posted, the previous postcards are inaccessible. Just be fair warned.) It is an extremely emotional and powerful site, just see a few of the comments left on PostSecret:

“When I read these, I don’t feel so alone.”-Calgary

“I wish I could give all these people on the site a hug and tell them it’s ok to be human.”-Washington DC

“Your site is truly inspirational, I’m left feeling full of compassion for my fellow human beings - We’re the same the world over.”-England.

“I cried when I saw your site. It’s truly amazing that so many people have so many secrets like mine. I wish I could just tell most of these people it will be ok, because I myself have never had anyone tell ME that…and it would help.”-West Virginia

“So many of my secrets are there, without even sending a card.”-Mexico

If you fall in love with this website as I have, you can also check out the published book, PostSecret: Extraordinary Confessions from Ordinary Lives, available on amazon.com. It features hundreds of the postcards sent in to PostSecret, many of which have never been seen online before. The day I bought it I couldn’t put it down; I read it from front to back without stopping.

Lastly, All American Rejects used the concept of, and actual postcards from, PostSecret for their Dirty Little Secret music video. “The clip features performance footage of the Rejects interspersed with images of people holding up postcards with messages as innocuous as "I pee in the sink" and as wounded as "Three years ago, I tried to kill myself. Now I'm 18 and people say I'm happy. But I still want to die."

Naturally, the Rejects compensated the site's owner for the use of the postcards. That money was then donated to the Kristin Brooks Hope Center, a Virginia not-for-profit organization that funds a suicide hotline for teens; some of the postcards from the video are also being auctioned on eBay, with proceeds earmarked for the same charitable cause, Ritter said.” source

To check out the awesome video, click here.