There are Easter Eggs hidden in the PostSecret Digital Museum of Secrets. One of them is a long article from PostSecret’s original mailcarrier – Kathy. If you have not discovered it already, go here and click on the mailbox. You can read Kathy’s story, and her secret. Here is the beginning. . .

As a mail carrier, I got used to seeing unusual things come through the mail. I have delivered ashes of deceased pets and humans to teary-eyed customers, tons of certified letters sent by bill collectors to equally teary-eyed customers, valuables in registered mail, live baby chicks, ducklings, worms, crickets, car tires and wheels, steamer trunks, and even packages that are broken and oozing with unknown materials. I have even been known to pick up a dog or two on my route, who had broken out of their yards and returned them to their owners. You’d think I’d be immune to odd things. But nothing prepared me for PostSecret!

In 2004, a customer of mine, Frank Warren, began receiving a few post cards in his daily mail. They were preprinted with his address and looked like a card that a dentist office would send reminding you of an upcoming appointment. It was just something I subconsciously noticed. There were only a few every day, and they all looked the same. I never turned them over to look on the other side. So, for a while I didn’t pay much attention. We deal with thousands upon thousands of letters during our mornings of casing our mail and don’t look to see who a letter is from or what it is. One day that all changed for me.

While handling one of Frank’s post cards, one fell out of my hands and landed upside down on the floor. I gasped when I read in huge bold letters, I LIKE TO HAVE SEX WITH STRANGERS. You can imagine my shock. That’s all it said. It had bold, bright coloring as a background. I’ll never forget it. I immediately showed some of my friends what I had found in the mail. One guy was so shocked he said, “Did a girl write it?” I was like, “how the heck do I know, who cares?” I then turned it over and looked on the address side of the card. I read the preprinted instructions next to Frank’s address. It invited you to participate in a group art project by writing a secret (that no one else knows) on the other side of this postcard and mail it anonymously to the printed address. I don’t have to tell you that I pulled the few postcards that were in his address slot that day and began reading them immediately! From that day forward, me, (and a few friends at work), began reading all the cards daily. I still didn’t really know what was going on, but I was intrigued. . . (continue)

Dear Kathy – I sent in a secret saying that I was going to kill myself in the next couple of days after writing it. Then a day or 2 after mailing it, I couldn’t get the thought out of my head that a mail carrier would read my postcard and not want me to die, even though they didn’t know me.

Maybe it was you – after reading your post I can see that you’re a special person. So thank you – I’m working things out.

Dear Frank,

The other day I was using a search engine to try to find an old secret that I had found very moving. While looking through the images I found a link to a blog containing my secret that I had sent in a little over year ago. My secret was: “being able to survive it doesn’t mean it was ever ok…”

The person wrote the following in reaction to my secret: “This quote, part of a PostSecret postcard this week, has been resonating within me since I read it. It makes me want to cry. And scream. And laugh. And it makes me angry. And it comforts me that somewhere out there someone feels the same way.”

The meaning has changed since I originally wrote it. At the time I was angry because people seemed to think that surviving meant beating it; they didn’t recognize that it was a struggle I was still enduring. Those who knew what I was going through praised me for surviving it or said they were sorry for what I went through. I didn’t want praise or pity, I needed support because it was a battle I was still fighting.

When I originally saw my secret posted on your Web site I suppose I thought I was going to find closure. Yet the real closure came a year later in this response. I had the support I needed all along in the heart of a stranger.

Thank you,
Heather

—–email—–

Dear Frank-
My boyfriend knew I was a PostSecret fan and a couple of days before Christmas this was in a package on my porch. It was the most thoughtful and unexpected gift. Thanks Rod and Frank!

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Dear Frank,

I am the poet who wrote the poem that begins, “Fuck the poets of the past, my friends…” (Its title is “Afterthought.”) My former student published it on Postsecret years ago and it has spread to people in distant places, unknown to me until two years ago, when a woman somehow found me and told me that the poem had help her too.

I saw it posted in Germany a few years ago. So cool. Every couple years somebody writes to me too. One woman sent me two pies once and thanked me for saving her life. Apple and blueberry, crushed in the mail, but I loved every bit.

I was trying to help a few students in one small poetry class on Long Island when I shared that poem with them and today I was notified that it is a Postsecret Classic. You cannot imagine how grateful I am that I have been able to do more good than I intended to, and that I got to find out that I did so. What a gift for the soul.