PidgeSecret: The Launch

There is something addictive about reading strangers’ secrets. Some are hilarious, some are emotional and some are so heart-warming you can’t help but be a little sick in your mouth. But whatever they are, they’re powerful,  authentic and you just can’t stop.

Postsecret is a community art project where people anonymously send their secrets on the back of a postcard to a stranger called Frank Warren in Maryland, USA. Starting in 2004 with just 3,000 postcards, randomly handed out in public places, it has snowballed into a nationwide movement. Secrets have become mini works of art; beautiful, ironic, with both photos and drawings. I’m sure I saw one written and mailed on a banana skin one week. There are galleries, art exhibitions and books with new secrets posted online every week to a website which receives over 5 million hits a month.

So, what’s your secret? University is a time of reinvention and self discovery and perhaps even your best friends don’t know all there is to know about you. Sharing a secret can be liberating, empowering and bloody scary, but it’s often the first step to dealing with it…

Maybe you eat your bogies when no one’s looking, or go to ridiculous lengths just to poo in solitude, or maybe it’s something darker and more personal; each secret is completely unique, and I bet you’ve got one.

Over the next few days and weeks, blank postcards will be appearing all around Cambridge. Look out for them in lecture theatres, libraries, p’lodges and bike baskets. They are an invitation to share your secret anonymously, and be part of the PidgeSecret project. Most of our template postcards have now been distributed but if you didn’t find one, don’t let that stop you. Any postcard or scrap of paper will do, get creative! 

Send them in via post or CUMS to “Dara Annett” at Selwyn College and remember to get them stamped in your p’lodge. Come back next week to see a selection of the ones we received…