Students and individuals from surrounding communities poured into the Grand Ballroom in the Student Union Memorial Center as Frank Warren, founder of PostSecret walked onto the stage Tuesday night.
PostSecret is an ongoing community mail art project, in which people mail their secrets anonymously on a homemade postcard to Warren’s home address. Warren then selects secrets and posts them on the PostSecret website or uses them in his PostSecret books.
“I always had this interior life myself and felt that others would have these feelings as well,” Warren said. “I was shocked when it resonated with thousands.”
PostSecret Live was sponsored by the Associated Students of the University of Arizona’s Wildcat Events Board and was completely sold out.
“This is all about sharing your secrets so students know there are other people going through what you are,” said Mary McIntosh, a biomedical engineering freshman and member of ASUA Wildcat Events Board.
The event consisted of postcards that were banned from the books, inspiring and funny stories behind the secrets, and at the end of Warren’s presentation, audience members shared emotional secrets at the microphone to the crowd.
“Young people are more alive and less phony and more concerned with what’s true and what’s bullshit,” Warren said.
Warren is on his PostSecret Live tour through December and has received more than half a million post cards from all over the world. He also said that every week he feels connected to one or two of the secrets. Twenty new secrets are posted every Sunday onto the blog.
“I relate to the secrets,” McIntosh said. “I read them every Sunday when they’re posted.”
With a sold-out event, local students weren’t the only ones to attend, and some were even seeing Warren again. Ashley Taylor drove from Phoenix to see Warren speak for the third time.
“Whether you have a secret or not, it’s life changing to hear him speak,” Taylor said. “It is so humanizing and really captures the human concept.”
A book signing concluded the event and attendees could buy a copy of Warren’s No. 1 New York Times Best Seller “PostSecret: Confessions on Life, Death, and God.”
“This is a time when people are feeling different about what they share about themselves,” Warren said. “PostSecret rides that wave, too.”
