I read PostSecret’s site every Sunday. It’s a little voyeuristic, I think, but we’re all a little bit Peeping Tom, aren’t we? Sometimes the secrets are funny, some are touching. But some make me really really upset. Secrets where someone is hurting someone else are very sad. The ones that are most upsetting are the ones about people hurting animals. A few months ago, a woman posted a secret that she was giving her cat antifreeze or something justso she could go see the cute vet. Today, a woman posted that when she felt the urge to stuff her face, she stuffs her dog’s face instead. I don’t understand the impulse to hurt animals in this way. Are they so selfish that a cat’s existence is just a means to a date with a vet? I can’t even wrap my mind around it.
I have the same reaction to people hurting kids but people don’t put secrets about hurting kids up on PostSecret. (Well…maybe Frank weeds them out or something.) A few months ago there was a spate of stories on CNN about various child abuses and I had to stop reading CNN for a while. Now I just avoid those stories. But at PostSecret, if someone mentioned hurting a child I suspect they’d be turned in to the police. But somehow it’s ok to post that you’re abusing animals.
PostSecret is supposed to be a cathartic non-judgemental way of sharing your secrets. There’s a catch about secrets though. You want to let them out because sometimes they’re just hanging around inside you, chewing on your insides. It makes you feel better to let them out but then they are hanging around whoever hears them, chewing at them instead. So when I read some of those secrets, I feel like the person must feel better but the trade-off is that the readers feel worse.
I don’t really know where I’m going with this. I started writing and this stuff just kind of came out. Maybe my lesson here is that I need to stop reading CNN and PostSecret.
The Writing Spider 