Sunday Secrets

Live February 1st – February 7th

— on backside of postcard —
This is your
last drawing
I
hopefully
find in my room
Goodbye. . .

25 Questions

A week ago I asked PostSecret followers on facebook for once-in-a-lifetime questions to ask my dad for an unforgettable interview. Over 700 replies with more than 1,000 questions came back.

This was my original post:

I was thrilled with all the thoughtful questions you shared with me, from the delightful to the profound. I read all of them and picked 25 to ask my dad. At a family dinner the night before our day of tandem paragliding, as an experiment, I peppered three into our conversation. . . it didn’t go well.

Like many families, ours was far from perfect, with divorce and estrangement being a part of it. So when other family members began responding to some of my father’s answers, long-buried feelings and some judgement turned the interview sour. Because of that learning experience, I changed some of my questions and gained three insights for when I would try again the next day.

• Avoid questions about regrets or mistakes and start with questions that include the word “favorite”, like, What’s your favorite decade and why?
• Keep the questions open-ended and let answers lead to other answers. Aim for a flowing conversation, not an interview.
• Really listen.

On the two hour drive to the Gliderport the next day, it was just my father and me in the car. I told him how much it meant to me to go through these questions and get to know him better. He was game so I cautiously started. He passed on some of the questions, but then really began to share a lot with me, including a secret. He even started asking me some of the same questions too! The spirit in the car was supportive and generous, with some heartfelt laughs as we used questions as prompts for our once-in-a-lifetime conversation.

Even though we were unable to do any gliding because of wind conditions, I’ll never forget that day and the new appreciation I have for me father. I can’t reveal the secret he told me but another part of our conversation shocked me. I asked this gentle and caring man, what is the most common misconception people have about you? He said. When I was ten-years-old, my mom spanked me for the last time. I don’t think you know how stubborn I was then but you do know how stern your Grandmother could be. I remember through my tears and pain looking at my mother and saying, with spite, “I like getting spanked”!

Thanks to everyone who contributed questions to my original post and I invite you all to use these questions to get to know your fathers (or mothers) better. If you do, leave a message on the PostSecret facebook page about your experience. I will repost them on Father’s Day.

Here are the 25 questions that guided our conversation with some additional resources at the bottom.

~~~

Can you tell me about your best friend when you were a kid and one of your adventures.

What is the oldest story you know about our ancestors?

Is there something about me that you have always wanted to know but have never asked?

Can you describe a favorite memory about a family member?

If this was to be our very last conversation, is there anything you would want to say to me?

Do you have a favorite snack, song, television show, recipe, comedy?

What is your first memory?

Did you ever get into trouble as a kid? What happened?

If there was a biography of you, how would you want to be described?

What choice are you thankful that you did not make?

What is the best advice you remember from your father?

Is there anything you wish you had said to someone but didn’t have the chance?

Can you teach me something?

What is something you would like me to ask you?”

What do you wish you would have spent less time worrying about?

What is something you deliberately did not tell me as a child and why?

What is the best part of your day? What makes you feel most alive?

What is the last thing you changed your mind about?

What things helped you get through a difficult time in your life?

Over the course of your life what trip or place was most special? Why?

What would you like to re-experience again because you did not appreciate it enough the first time?

Can you tell me something about yourself that I don’t know that you think would surprise, shock or delight me?

What habits served you the most through life?

What is the best mistake you have made, and why?

What do you hope my siblings and I have learned from you?

How are you doing right now? Is there anything on your mind right now that you’d like to talk about?

~~~

(When my father visits again, I’ll be sure to have his favorite comedy and snack ready.)

~~~

Discover hundreds more questions on the PostSecret facebook page.
https://www.facebook.com/postsecret

Find further inspiration and more ideas at StoryCorp.
https://storycorps.org/

Classic Secrets

Originally Posted January 3rd, 2012

I’m excited to be a keynote speaker at the Active Minds 2020 National Conference along with Zachary Levi.

Tina’s Story

At a PostSecret Live! event, like this one, Tina walked up to a microphone and bravely shared her secret. She said. . .

“I wrote my secret about my eating disorder on a postcard and mailed it to you but you never posted it up on the website or put it in any PostSecret books. I decided I needed to action on my secret myself. So I made this shirt that I’m wearing right now.”

At that moment, most everyone there turned back to see Tina and the shirt she was wearing. Tina described the hand-drawn letters on her shirt.

“The front of the shirt says, ‘20% will die from their anorexia’ and on the back I’ve listed some of the symptoms of eating disorders”.

“I decided I needed to wear this shirt to school to ‘out’ myself but Monday morning, after I put it on, my knees started shaking. I became terrified as I imagined what my classmates would think and I worried about how my professors would react.”

“Somehow I found the strength to keep the shirt on and made myself march straight into class exposing my secret. I was shocked by what happened next. Not only did my friends and professor support me but they asked me to make more shirts so they could wear them too. So now I make these shirts – and I wanted you to have one.”

Tina was one brave girl who found a creative way to share her secret in a way that brought awareness and healing to her and her community. I wonder if Tina knows that the transformative story she told over ten years ago continues to inspire others to free their secrets today.

What Is The Ultimate Secret?

When I pulled the perfect secret from my mailbox and looked at it, I didn’t understand, it because it had no words.

It didn’t appeal to me immediately because it lacked any confession that I could see. The secrets that do make the biggest impression on me are probably not what most people would expect. They can be funny and sad at the same time; they can be hopeful or reflect my own dark sense of humor. Here are three I’ll never forget.

“I steal small things from my friends to keep memories of how much I love them,” mailed on a photograph of a photograph.

“I WANT TO BE A SUPERHERO! I would use my power to take away your pain,” written in red next to a woman in an action pose.

“I hope your stupid wrapping paper collection catches fire and burns down your house,” written on a postcard wrapped in Christmas paper.

The perfect secret was not mailed to me on a postcard. It arrived as a rolled-up painting canvas, but that in itself did not make it very unusual. Even though I ask people to mail me anonymous confessions on postcards, regularly, creative people send me more like personal possessions with secret written directly on them. Among the postcards, secrets have arrived on a mask, bra, flip-flop, watch, purse, and shirt. They’ve also been mailed on seashells, naked Polaroid pictures, a Utah license plate, certificates of birth and death, a sonogram, even an uncooked Idaho potato with my home address and postage right on the skin. (The Post Office calls this, “naked mail”).

The painting of the young man and woman didn’t seem that meaningful to me the first time I unrolled the canvas. For me the most meaningful secrets come from strangers yet reveal secrets that we can see in ourselves. Maybe you have come across one of your secrets written in another person’s handwriting. Or perhaps you felt less alone when you saw a postcard you mailed on Sunday.

I have had that experience. Looking back from a pyramid of postcards now taller than me, I can more clearly see some of the reasons I started PostSecret. I used to tell people I began collecting secrets because I had a boring job. That was partially true, but there was a deeper reason driving me, one I was unaware of at the time. I was building a safe community where anyone could reveal private truths because I needed to join and unburden myself.

As months passed, I began to understand the perfect secret as being more than likable or meaningful- it was transcendent. It was a painting showing trust, vulnerability, and courage- a place where secrets lose their power over us. It’s something I can feel at PostSecret Live! events when audience members courageously transform their secrets from walls to bridges, not anonymously but publicly. I saw it in the PostSecret app and heard it as a volunteer on Hopeline. It’s an idea I see in some of the private emails people send me, like these two:

“Frank, I made a PostSecret postcard with a drawing of my fiancé asleep and a message about changing the alarm to spend more time with her. She found it before I could mail it to you and now we spend more time together while awake too. Thanks.”

“Dear Frank, I am going to buy a piñata and invite my friends to put their secrets in anonymously. Then we can blindfold each other, beat the shit out of it, watch our secrets rain down, and read them like candy.”

For me the ultimate secret is this simple wordless painting expressing that sacred place where secrets are never born between people or within our hearts.