Day 30

Sigh...

That aside, the highlight of my day today was going to Borders and finding a secret that someone had slipped inside a Post Secret book. I almost bought the book so that I could keep that reader-added secret. Actually the added secret was already the second secret placed into that particular book -- the person who wrote this secret stated her intent to mail the previous secret off to the actual Post Secret address, then added a secret of her own. I almost wrote a secret to hide in one of the books as well. I don't know how common it is for bookstore browsers to hide secrets in the books, but I find the gesture poignant.

All of us who follow the Post Secret phenomenon (postsecret.blogspot.com) probably either ran across it unintentionally (I first noticed the first book a couple years back while browsing a since-closed bookstore) or were introduced to it by someone else who did. Certainly we are all different people, but I wonder what we have in common that makes the project speak to us. Maybe it's simply that we all recognize that we have secrets ourselves and wish that someone would ask us about them. More likely, we keep things secret that we wish were not so, but fear the repercussions of discovery, yet the still small voice of truth refuses to let us keep silent. Perhaps we don't really want these things to remain secret, but don't trust that anyone we know would understand them, so we reveal them to strangers in the hopes that someone out there will understand. I don't know.

I also don't know how mainstream the movement has become, though, since the books seem to sell pretty well. Maybe the only thing we really have in common is that we're all just nosey...