PostSecret blog creator shares secrets live in SLO

For a dozen years, Warren has served as a confessor, safe harbor and sounding board for hundreds of thousands of people with secrets to share. Strangers send artfully decorated postcards bearing anonymous, deeply personal messages to his Germantown, Maryland, mailbox, and he posts them on his blog, PostSecret, every Sunday.

“The secrets can be shocking and laugh-out-loud funny and painful, but also hopeful,” he said.

Warren will share some of his favorite secrets — and invite audience members to divulge their own — as part of his interactive multimedia show, “PostSecret Live!,” April 10 at the Performing Arts Center in San Luis Obispo. (Due to adult content, the event, which includes a book signing, is recommended for ages 17 and up.)

“It’s a real cathartic event — not just for the (people) who can tell their stories but for the people who hear them,” he said.

Warren came up with the idea for PostSecret in 2004 while working as a medical information broker.

“Thank god for boring jobs because it pushed me to do creative stuff in my spare time,” Warren said, such as work as a volunteer for a suicide prevention hotline.

He also started handing out self-addressed, stamped postcards to strangers on the street, encouraging them to write their secrets on the postcards and mail them to him. His original goal was to receive 365 replies; so far, he’s received more than 1 million.

“When I started it felt like a lark or a prank,” Warren said, but the community art project soon took on deeper meaning.

Three months after launching PostSecret, “I got a postcard from a stranger who articulated a secret in my own life that articulated it better than I could have myself,” recalled Warren, who wouldn’t divulge his realization. (He will, however, discuss it during his live show.)

“It made me realize there are two kinds of secrets,” he continued. “There are secrets we keep from others and the ones we hide from ourselves.”

PostSecret has a place for both, he explained.

The site has allowed people to air revelations about addiction, abuse, sexuality, relationships and religion, among other taboo topics. Warren said he frequently hears from people who have been deeply moved by reading someone’s secret or sharing their own.

“There’s something about these confessions that (is) so heartfelt and soulful that when you read about them, you want to respond, ‘I have this secret too,’” he said. “The project becomes about more than individual voices. It becomes a conversation.”

That conversation has expanded over the years.

In 2006, for instance, more than 900 PostSecret fans moved by Warren’s pleas raised $30,000-plus in about a week to help the nonprofit Kristin Brooks Hope Center keep its suicide prevention hotline open.

PostSecret, which advertises itself as “the largest advertisement-free blog in the world,” has attracted nearly 750 million visitors since 2004. The project has spawned a play (“PostSecret: The Show”), an album (“PostSecret: The Album” by One Hello World) and six best-selling books, including 2009’s “PostSecret: Confessions on Life, Death, and God.”

The project has also inspired museum shows. More than 500 postcards are on display through September at the Smithsonian Institution’s Postal Museum in Washington, D.C., as part of the exhibition “PostSecret: The Power of a Postcard.”

Warren launched his touring show, “PostSecret Live!,” seven or eight years ago.

“The events give me an opportunity to do what I’ve been doing on the Web for years, which is creating a safe, nonjudgmental place where people feel safe to share,” said Warren, whose 2012 TED talk on the subject has garnered nearly 2.8 million views.

The live show also gives him a space to discuss secrets that were banned for the “PostSecret” books for copyright, content or privacy issues. And it offers him a chance to tell the stories behind them.

“I invite people to take the microphone and share a secret live. That’s the most emotional portion of the night,” Warren said, noting that marriage proposals are particularly popular. “Every proposal I’ve had (during the show) has had a positive response.”

Warren also invites attendees to approach him after the show and share secrets one-on-one.

The PostSecret creator said that his blog resonates the most with “younger people who live their lives more online and are creative and understanding.”

“This project would not have been possible at any other time in human history,” Warren said, because it marries old and new technologies. “Each one of us now has access to basically an unlimited printing press. All we have to do is find the right words and put them in the right order to change the world.”

This story was originally published March 31, 2016 at 6:53 AM with the headline "PostSecret blog creator shares secrets live in SLO."