Secrets are revealed at UIS’ PostSecret event

December 09, 2008
By Michael Omenazu
Staff writer

Photo by David Clary

Secrets are forever notorious for not making friends, but it is secrets that made Frank Warren rich. Frank Warren, who graduated from Springfield High School here in Illinois, has developed a website for people everywhere to tell their secrets anonymously.  People of all walks of life creatively write their secret on a homemade post card and send to Warren’s address in Maryland. Each Sunday about noon Warren uploads about twenty new ones to his personal website, which he started January 1, 2005, postsecret.blogspot.com. 

This idea of sharing secrets anonymously came to UIS as a passive event held by the Student Activities Committee (SAC). Mary Kate Bansley, who has been a fan the PostSecret community for some time, is quite aware that Warren visits schools and wanted to bring the creator and popular campus speaker UIS to speak. Bansley said that such a visit was too expensive, but she still wanted to hold a PostSecret event on campus.    

The SAC decided to collect secrets of students, faculty, and staff from late October until Dec. 5.  Drop off boxes were located in seven spots on campus including P20, LRH, FRH, and SAB. An open house of the collected secrets was held in the Visual and Performing Arts building on Dec. 1 at 5pm, where the collected secrets were displayed. Cookies and punch were available for those who came to check out the secrets.

About 50 secrets were collected by the end of Friday, Dec. 5. It was less than Bansley had anticipated, but some interested secrets were submitted. People who came to the open house described the secrets on the wall as “interesting’ and ‘neat.”  Some secrets showed a lot of creativity in their design and message, others secrets were simple, effectively getting their messages across.

Jessica Kerwin, a freshman and huge fan of PostSecret, came to the open house to check out other peoples secret. “It really like it. I go the website frequently and I have a couple of the books,” she said.

“I think we all have secrets, “ stated Beth Hoag, “and I think it’s healthy to share them safely so someone else can read them and not feel alone.” Hoag actually met Frank Warren a few years ago.

The secrets collected by SAC will be sent to the official PostSecret community and hopefully end up in an upcoming book, or website. Since 2005 when Warren started the blog website he has collected over 200,000 secrets, which selected ones have been complied into has four books published, including A Lifetime of Secrets, Extraordinary Confessions from Ordinary Lives, The Secret Lives of Men, and Women and My Secret.

If you would like to still submit a secret, write it, creatively, on a 3X5 homemade postcard and mail it to: PostSecret, 13345 Copper Ridge, Germantown MD, 20874. Be sure to check out postsecret.blogspot.com to see if your secret made it to the site.