It started with blank postcards. Frank Warren, founder and curator of the Post Secret project, handed out empty postcards in November 2004 and invited strangers to mail in their secrets. He received 150 postcards within a week.

“When I stopped sending out postcards, I thought the project was over, but the project wasn’t done with me,” Warren said.

By the end of March, Warren will have received his 200,000th postcard as part of Post Secret. Each day he gets between 100 and 200 cards from all over the world, each carrying a secret the sender has never shared with anyone else. Some cards are simple, other are covered with beautiful drawings or photos. To Warren, each postcard is a piece of art.

Warren came to Creighton on March 12 and spoke with students about his project. In a phone interview, Warren said that speaking at different schools is his favorite part because he loves hearing students’ stories.

CSU program board contacted Warren in the fall asking him to speak on campus. Sally Breining, Creighton in Common coordinator, said that they were interested in having Warren come because they’d heard him speak before and thought his message worked with the Creighton in Common mission.

At the event, Warren stepped on stage with a small silver box. He opened it up and read a few secrets. Warren said that each of us has a box and we can either bury it inside us like a coffin or take it out into the light and share the secrets. He had two themes: the first was that when we think we’re keeping a secret, sometimes that secret is actually keeping us. The second was that any of us have the potential to face a secret and share it with ourselves or others releasing ourselves from the burden.

“When I started the project I knew it would be something very special for me. Like in my own life, I always felt like I had this kind of interesting, interior secret life,” Warren said in a phone interview. “I figured other people did and I thought if they could find a safe, non-judgmental space it would be fascinating.”

This safe space was created in February 2005 with www.postsecret.com, a web blog where Warren posts 20 new secrets each Sunday. Since it’s creation the Web site has had over 120 million visitors. Christine Dobel, Arts & Sciences junior, started looking at the blog a few weeks ago.

“I’d seen his books before and learned he had a Web site,” Dobel said. “When I looked at his Web site and books, I thought it was really cool.”

PostSecret was named “Blog of the Year” for the second year in a row at the annual weblog awards (“Bloggies”) in 2007. In addition, Warren has received seven other Bloggies and two Webby Awards for his work on PostSecret.

“I think of the Web site as a place to share living secrets, the secrets people are dealing with in real time,” Warren said.

Because he takes the secrets off the blog after a week, Warren decided that publishing the secrets in book form would be “an opportunity to have a longer testament or archive of secrets.” He said he was surprised at first at how similar all our secrets were beneath the surface. “They tie into the same emotions and experiences,” Warren said. “There’s this greater unity beneath our everyday experience.”

Many of the postcards deal with eating disorders, self-harm and suicide. Warren said that loneliness is the emotion he sees most in the postcards.

“I think that’s the effort or the difficulties of trying to form trusting relationships with other people and I see that expressed in so many of the details of so many different kinds of secrets,” Warren said. “It boils down to that very human experience of finding people we can trust and connecting with others in a meaningful way.”

Through the project, Warren said he’s gained a greater sense of empathy and hopes other people share his experience. For him, the project is about connecting with other people.

“There’s a secret inside all of us that if you knew what it was, it would break your heart,” Warren said. “I think if we all could remember that there would be more compassion in the world.”

At the end of Warren’s talk, students in the audience were given the chance to share their secrets. Some secrets were funny and some were full of pain. Each secret was greeted with loud applause.

When the last student told her secret, Warren shared his own, a painful memory from childhood that he mailed to himself after a stranger mailed in a similar experience.

Warren said that sharing his own secret is the hardest part of every Post Secret event and that it was the most degrading experience he’s ever had. However, he wouldn’t go back and change it.

“The events that caused the most pain and the most confusion are the events that are the most meaningful now,” Warren said. “Free your secrets and become who you are.”