PostSecret

I have this recurring experience in my life whereas I’ll regularly be late in my discovery of something. It happens with any kind of stuff, but particularly with with music: how can it be that I discovered this artist so ashamingly late? For example, I only came to hear about Anthony and the Johnsons a couple months ago, in 2009 already... (Clearly some processes in my life could be streamlined.)

Anyway, this is not about music, but some of the other kind of stuff. Through the magic of the intarwebs and by virtue of people who care to compile a list of worthwhile links in their homepages (I should definitely do that some time), I came to know about the PostSecret project (blog, page, wikipedia). The premise is simple: anonymous people send in a self-made postcard with a short message, which must be a truthful secret never revealed to anyone before. Every Sunday, the creator of the project (Frank Warren) will post to the site a selection of the received postcards.

If you visit during this week, you’ll see a themed edition of sorts, dubbed Father’s Day Secrets. I urge you to take a look, now or after finishing this post. I can’t even begin to describe how powerful the experience was for me. Upon introspection, I think it’s because each one of these secrets is a concentrated drop of empathy waiting to hit your brain. If you’re not too keen on empathizing with others, maybe you won’t enjoy the site after all. (And, of course, not all of these drops result equally powerful to one’s sensibility.)

There have been several books published with many of such postcards, which is great since unfortunately each weekly set disappears from the blog upon the arrival of the next one (or shortly thereafter). If you use Google Reader, that’s great because it keeps a history of all posts since 2007 (though the images don’t seem to load for the oldest of them). Alternatively, you may visit the Spanish translation, which displays the original images in addition to their translation, and allows to visit older entries.

Finally, I can’t but help to show a couple here. First, the really sad ones:

Then, a very light one:

And then, this one: