Post Secret and my secrets

Ben and I went to the Post Secret exhibit this weekend. An artist from the area, Frank Warren, started a project in which he passed out postcards at a show for people to write anonymous secrets on and send back to him. He got a HUGE response. I don't know how many cards he's gotten, but now he gets emails, handmade postcards, and letters, and all sorts of things since he stopped handing out postcards. He created a blog, showing the postcards. We stood in line for 2 hours to see the exhibit on Saturday. It closed Sunday, on its way to a national tour.

The exhibit was in the old Staples building on M Street, for those of you who lived in DC a few years ago. When we finally got in, we wandered around the different parts of the exhibit because we were sick of waiting in line and the general snaking flow of the exhibit was just as slow as the line. There were a few tables and chairs with postcards in boxes, an area where postcards hung from fishing wire, a few blown-up postcards on the walls, and rows and rows of postcards inserted in 5-photo plastic photo album pages, hung at eye level with binder clips to fishing wire strung between the pillars. Probably thousands of postcards. Because they were anonymous and secrets tend to be bad, most were very sad and some scary and disheartening. There were a few funny ones, like "I want to take a dump on my mother's white carpet." But most of them had to do with incest, cheating, violence, eating disorders, self-loathing, etc. Some emails on the walls wrote to thank te artist for showing them they weren't alone and inspiring them to change their lives. Other people wrote to say they had given their postcard to someone in their lives instead of sending it, and talked about the good things that came of it. One made me laugh because I understood his/her plight: "I check my online journal 50 times a day to see if someone will post a comment... No one ever has." C'mon, people, don't lurk! I know you're reading this!