Students’ voices shook as they voiced their deepest secrets.

Confessing attempted suicides, battles with depression, losing parents to cancer and personal sexual activity to an auditorium full of strangers, they bore all to a full audience.

The point of Frank Warren’s sharing exercise was this: You are not alone.

PostSecret creator Warren shared his ‘PostSecret Live’ presentation to a sold-out Goldstein Auditorium Wednesday night. Telling stories of humor, hope, despair and strength, Warren discussed the countless secrets he has read since the PostSecret project started in November 2004. The PostSecret Project allows anyone to mail Warren postcards with their personal secrets written on them.

‘I believe we all keep our secrets in a box, and each day we decide what to do with that box,’ Warren said. ‘Often we bury the box like a coffin, but when we share it, that can be the most liberating thing in the world.’

Warren talked about the history of PostSecret and the personal struggles his project helped him face. He said he received a postcard with a photo of a door with holes in it that read, ‘The holes are from when my mother tried to knock down my door so she could continue beating me.’ Warren uploaded that postcard on the PostSecret website and received about a dozen other postcards from people who faced similar situations.

‘Those postcards helped me recognize and deal with the fact that I had that same door in my childhood,’ Warren said. ‘The courage those people showed in sharing their secrets helped me face my own.’

Warren has received almost every imaginable secret. The most common secret he gets is ‘I pee in the shower,’ but he has also received revenge postcards and ripped up suicide notes in envelopes. He said he has read secrets on In-N-Out Burger bags, seashells and sonograms.

‘At the core of every secret I get, there is a kernel of truth that we can learn from and grow from,’ he said.

Warren said he started PostSecret by walking around Washington, D.C., and approaching passersby.

‘I would go up to people and say, ‘Hi, my name is Frank and I collect secrets,” Warren said. He paused. ‘It felt as weird as it sounds.’

Most people told him they didn’t have secrets. He eventually persuaded them to write down a secret anyway and discovered those were usually the most interesting ones.

Students were surprised by how relevant they found the presentation.

‘It hit home for me in ways that I definitely wasn’t expecting,’ said Leslie Ott, a sophomore inclusive elementary special education major.

Jessica Denman, a freshman fashion design major, said she has been reading PostSecret since she was in eighth grade but did not expect the presentation to resonate with her so strongly. ‘It was shockingly relatable,’ she said.

Warren also talked about the importance of turning ideas into reality. At one point, he flashed a photo of a nipple with a hair being plucked from it, and the word ‘confession’ was scrawled across the top. The photo was one of many censored from Warren’s five PostSecret books by his publisher, HarperCollins Publishers.

He encouraged students to take risks and embrace the power of the Internet, just as he did, and to put their ideas into action.

‘I know that there are one thousand, maybe ten thousand people out there who have ideas as good as or better than PostSecret,’ he said. He said each time he gives his presentation, he hopes to inspire someone to take an idea, believe in it and make it happen.

After Warren’s presentation, students lined up at microphones on either side of the auditorium and confessed their own secrets.

Some fought back tears as they shared their pain with the crowd. One student said he was rejected from 10 of the 13 schools he applied to and still feels like a failure. As he walked back to his seat, another student shouted, ‘You’re not a failure!’ prompting the crowd to cheer wildly.

Choking through her story, another student teared up as she talked about the suicide of a close friend and her own struggles with depression. Strangers hugged her as she walked back to her seat.

‘I really admired the bravery of everyone who came up to the microphone,’ said Kerey Morris, a freshman international relations major. ‘I wasn’t expecting all the random hugging and support. It was amazing.’

Warren travels around the country giving his presentations because of the support that rises in response to the students who quiver through their secrets.

‘Each story you all shared is an individual fingerprint,’ he said. ‘But together, they tell our universal story and remind us of the most important thing: You are never alone.’  

ertocci@syr.edu

Published on October 20, 2010 at 12:00 pm