Postsecret Lecture.

Tonight, Frank Warren, the man who created Postsecret, spoke at school. Basically, Postsecret is this ongoing art project that he created where people from all over the world design postcards expressing secrets that they want to share anonymously, and every Sunday, he posts certain ones. There have also been books released with these secrets, and he has received over 500,000 secrets. I remember being an angsty freshman and thought it was amazing that all of these people had the same angsty, lonely thought s that I did, and even though I’ve grown up a little from the perspective, I still continue to read them every Sunday; I feel like they have grown up with me and made me grow up in the long run.
Anyway, I was extremely excited for the lecture, because I have never gotten a chance to attend one at home. It was exactly what I thought it would be; he shared some secrets that he has received that mean something to him, and how the process of this collection began and then people were invited to go up to the microphone and share their secrets. This was the part that I was most interested in; some of the parts he spoke about were things I had already read about or seen in some videos of his lectures, but this part of the talks he gives is strictly unique to each lecture. I was curious to see whether people actually were able to strike up the nerve and share their deepest secrets to a roomful of strangers, which is scary enough, and their classmates, which I feel would be even scarier. But people lined up at the microphones and shared funny secrets about things that happened in their childhood, like mistaking condom wrappers for candy wrappers, or awful things like not being able to tell their father that their son was a result of rape.
As heartbreaking as some of these secrets were, they created a strangely beautiful moment in the very crowded gym. There was a deafening momentary silence as the audience processed the secret for themselves, and then immediately followed by the applause, like a thank-you to the person for being so brave as to be so vulnerable and willing to open themselves up to a room of strangers. As much as it was painful to hear these secrets and as painful as it probably was for them to share, I was disappointed when the last person told their secret.
I wrote my final paper on how beautiful experiences are far more valuable than material possessions, and it is nights like this that emphasize this fact for me. As cheesy as I guess it could have been considered, there is something remarkable about the fact that such trust can be generated by a room full of strangers that have bonded over nothing except a common knowledge of how it feels to hide something. There was something very beautiful about this sense of just general compassion and support and humanity that was spreading through the room, and it is something that I cannot really sum up in words. To the discussion on beauty, I think this also emphasizes Smith’s idea of abstract beauty being much greater than concrete beauty in that the lecture has shown me how beauty can exist in even the darkest places; it is almost like there is some extent of beauty in everything, that little light that continues to flicker amidst the shadow of something awful.