What's your secret?

PostSecret is an ongoing community art project
where people mail-in their secrets anonymously
on one side of a homemade postcard.
Check out the blog.

So, what's your secret? No, really. What is it?

What's the thing you don't tell anyone? What's the thing you think would keep people from loving you? How many do you have? If you found out that other people have the same secret, would you search for them? And if you found them, would you let them in on your own?

Everyone has secrets. Some of them are dark. Some of them are funny. Some of them are spelled out in anonymous blogs. Most of them go with us to our graves. Thanks go out to Baraka for sharing the link to the PostSecret project, where "people mail in their secrets anonymously on one side of a homemade postcard."

Here are some of my favorites:

• Over the image of a broken train someone wrote: "There was a train wreck by my house. I ran to the site and mingled with the other passengers, acting like I had been on the train. I received an $8000 settlement for pain and suffering due to my 'back injury'."
• Someone sent in a photo of a Buddha statue speaking the words: "I fed my family for free for about a year by simply wheeling filled shopping carts out the door."
• Someone else left lipstick marks all over a piece of paper and wrote: "This is me procrastinating on my suicide note..."

It's strange how a secret can hold power over you. And it's liberating when you tell someone what it is, then realize they're still sitting beside you.

Perhaps the coolest thing I've discovered in this life is the fact that everybody has them.

How do I know? About four years ago, in an attempt to make a few small personal repairs, I went to a weekend-long retreatish/cultish emotional boot camp called Landmark Forum. I went because I knew four people who had done it and who swore it had changed their lives in profound ways. Granted, I caught them immediately post-forum, when most people who go through the program experience a heighted state of elation from discovering why they were so messed up and how they can live from now on as a considerably less messed up person. The question then becomes whether or not they can sustain the changes they want to make, but that's another conversation all together. How the Forum manipulates the audience through the experience is also a topic for later. How the Forum recruits the audience is ethically questionable but, again, a topic for some other time.

To get a sense for what it was like, picture 120 people in a large room with no windows, sitting in 120 chairs facing a stage, where our inspirational speaker led us through a series of exercises designed to get us to sort through our baggage. We sat in this room about 15 hours a day for three days. And pretty much the only way you were going to experience any sort of "breakthrough" was to pay attention to the secrets your peers spoke into the microphones on either side of the stage.

In grand American over-sharing style, it didn't take long for the first person to get up to the microphone to talk about why they were there. You've got to figure that something pretty big inspired each of us to pay $350, give up a vacation day plus a weekend, and go through some sort of magic process that no one could quite describe before we signed up. The first guy at the mic told us that he'd been getting bad grades. The speaker led him, then his mother, through a short series of conversations that exposed some previously unspoken tension between them that led to a grand finale expression of love between them and a promise to be more studious from now on. Hurrah! We all clapped for them and from there on an endless stream of strangers took turns at the microphone to tell us their darkest crap.

And some of it was pretty dark.

And some of the people cried when they said it.

Sometimes I would ache while I listened.

And, yep. While I spent the first day grateful to the brave folk who dared to bare all in front of an audience, I writhed inside my skin at the thought of standing up there to share my own secret dark crap. Until Day 2. That's when I saw so many people actively letting go of years and years of baggage so successfully that I finally took my own turn at the mic, spilling my guts about why I was there and what my baggage looked like.

Sure, the whole thing sounds like a hippy-dippy, tree-hugging, love-in, but I didn't care. Listening to a high-powered executive tell us that he had been cheating on his wife for 15 years and a respected scientist confess her compulsive behavior was liberating. Every time we returned from a break we were encouraged to sit next to someone else, and every someone I sat next to had even more humiliating crap to share. Our leader encouraged us to think of people who had hurt us in the past and encouraged us to call them to talk about it. One by one, people around me started to have the breakthroughs we were promised when we wrote Landmark our checks on registration day. All of these people walked around as if they were Atlas, sans the weight of the world on his shoulders.

I wouldn't say that I had a breakthrough, but I would say I learned a whole lot. Through the bravery of people who were willing to share their stories, I realized that I was not the only one who did not have everything figured out. In fact, I finally felt like part of the majority, because no one really does. While some of the secrets people shared with us seemed like nothing to be ashamed of to me, I could identify with the humiliation that kept them silent. And if their stuff is no big deal to me, then maybe my stuff isn't such a big deal after all.

And if it’s not a big deal, why hold on to it?

While I’m not in a hurry to share every last thing I am ashamed of with the world, I suppose blogging is a small attempt to keep myself honest and real. It’s a constant decision to write or, more to the point, not write about people and topics that are important to me. I would love to have the gigunda balls to talk about issues that plague or amuse me, regardless of who I know is reading about them. David Sedaris is one of my heroes that way, having built his livelihood on hanging his family skeletons under a neon sign that screams “Yo! Over here!” He once said that he writes it like it is, and if those he writes about were honest with themselves, they would find truth in his words.

I dare you to be more honest with yourself and your friends, even for a day.

I’m going to take that challenge myself, and start with confronting the lady with the horrible 80’s hairdo and gem sweater on the other side of this café. Someone really has to tell the poor woman the truth…