Secrets

Secrets. Every single person in this room has a secret. They can be simple, such as: I like the guy sitting in front of me, I forgot to put on deodorant this morning, I haven‘t brushed my teeth in a week.. They can also be life-altering: My friend killed a man. I was raped. I’m pregnant and I’m not keeping the baby.

Mark Twain once said: “Everyone is like a moon, and has a dark side which he never shows to anybody.” This is true. Humans are creatures filled with complexities and dualities. When a person tells another that they have a secret, the first reaction is simple: What is it? What could it be? Is it something about me? Or is it something about someone else? Will this change how I see this person forever? What IS it?!

Secrets are a double-edged sword. As I said before, some can be fun, silly, and light-hearted while others ache inside of us like a thorn in our side. Sigmund Freud was a firm believer that any and all secrets we have locked inside us manifest themselves in our subconscious and our dreams. Secrets cannot and will not be swept underneath a metaphorical rug; they poke and prod us, always in the back of our minds, lurking and preparing to pounce upon us when we least expect it. Freud was a firm believer in the “Fundamental rule of Psychoanalysis” where the patient had to be completely open with their therapist no matter how insignificant the thought was. James Pennebaker would conduct experiments in which a group of people would write their deepest darkest for twenty minutes, and hundreds of people poured out their secrets within the first few years. They felt more free than they had before, which was mirrored in their actual handwriting.

Secrets bring out issues of morality. If someone told you that they killed someone, what do you do? At first glance, the first question would be to tell someone else, but is it that simple? You run the risk of losing this person yet if you kept the knowledge to yourself, it would eat away at your conscious. Secrets hurt and hurt deeply at times if we allow them to fester in our hearts.

There is a  man--a simple business owner from Maryland-- has done something similar to Pennebaker‘s experiments, but not as a psychological experiment. What began as a community art-project in 2004 has turned into something much larger and more emotional than anything he had ever envisioned. Post Secret is Frank Warren’s blog where he has received over 150,000 anonymous postcards and emails detailing people’s darkest secrets. He has published 3 books with various postcards and emails in them, collections where these people can have the freedom of bearing their souls while still remaining anonymous and just another face in the crowd. This book, A Lifetime of Secrets, is claimed to be Warren’s most moving book yet, where the reader is subjected to confessions of infidelity, lies, rape, love, drugs, sex, fears, hopes, dreams, and everything in between.

Why are we scared to tell our secrets? The answer is simple: We fear the repercussions, whether they are real or ones generated in our own imaginations. Abuse in families is usually kept a secret out of the fear that the family will be torn apart. Traumatic events such as rape and molestation are suppressed to the point that the victim will never remember it without severe therapy. Still, the fear of the repercussions is in direct conflict with our strong desire to just tell someone. Keeping a secret is difficult work because knowingly deceiving another person even when they have no idea can cause a person mental and physical stress.

Secrets. We all have one. Some secrets are bigger than others, but all are important in some way. If you feel the need to tell your secret, it’s ok; so does the person next to you. Write them down, scream it out into the wind, whisper it to a friend. If you want, you can even go to post secret.com and share your secret with Frank Warren, like these people did. Any questions?