Post Secret

I'm a pretty big fan of PostSecret. I own a few of the books, I've attended a lecture, and I check the website every Sunday religiously. Some people have the Sunday cartoons, I have PostSecret. For anyone who doesn't know the PostSecret story, a guy had a great idea to ask people to mail him one secret they had never told anyone before on the back of a post card. What started as a simple social experiment has now turned into a full career for him. The secrets are like little art projects and they come in from all over the world. Some of them are funny, others heartbreaking, and some are just plain different. I've seen some of my secrets on that site, though I've never sent one.

I joined the online community a while back but don't participate because I saw too much judgment for my liking. I just saw a few secrets get criticized and didn't really want to see that anymore. I still have an account and when I see a secret that I want to see the discussion on, I'll go back to the boards and see what people have to say about it. This maybe happens once a month.

A few weeks ago, a secret was posted on the website on Sunday. It read "My cousin has a brother he doesn't know about and I can't tell him". Naturally, I had to check out the community discussion. I was totally blown away by how many people said they had the same secret or something very similar. Some of it came from adoption, some of it came from remarriage, some of it was because a parent wasn't raising a child… It was so interesting to me that so many people identified.

I am that secret child in my family. My sisters don't know about me. I feel like I type that sentence a lot. It just goes to show how much that statement hurts me. It's nice to know that I'm not along, but heartbreaking that so many others are going through the same thing.

For the record, as someone who's a secret child, I think that if you know about it, you should find a way to tell, especially if that sibling is not a minor. I don't think it would be easy, and I'm not saying this is a black and white area, but I think it's better to know. And I think that in some cases it would alleviate a lot of the pain that comes later. That's just me though.