11 PM - Christal Earle’s Blog

My friend, Nettie, showed me this book she recently bought called “Postsecret”. It is an incredibly fascinating social experiment that this guy named Frank Warren did . He sent out hundreds of postcards and told everyone that got them that they could write a secret on it and send it back-the only condition was that it had to be a secret that no one else knew about them. The results were a crazy combination of hilarious, bizarre, and quite tragic…

One lady said that when she is mad at her husband, she puts boogers in her soup…I can see her logic there. Who hasn’t wanted to do that? Another girl gave up a dirty secret: ” I love to pee when I am swimming”. Or my personal favorite: “I give decaf to customers who are rude to me”…talk about sinister!

But then there are the really sad ones about people who have been abused and molested and never told anyone-that should never be a secret. There is one about a girl who was bullied at a fountain at school, and to this day, whenever she gets nervous, she feels thirsty. There is one confessing to murder, and so many confessing to self-hatred. One that really broke my heart: “All of my life people have told me I’m not special…I’m very easy to replace. After 43 years it has finally sunk in. I finally get it.” Wow, that makes me wish I could find that person and tell them that no matter how many times they have heard that, it is an ugly lie that has robbed them of 43 years of truth. I wish I could communicate to them how incredibly special they are and that they are irreplaceable.

This whole concept had me thinking about a few things myself. Do I have any deep dark secrets that I would love to put down on a postcard and mail off to someone I will never meet? Well, I have never put boogers in Vaden’s soup…mostly because I don’t cook, he does (which is now causing me concern after this revelation), I have never given someone decaf when I was mad at them (because that is just plain vindictive), and I have never felt like I was replaceable. I have always known that there is a unique destiny for my life that I need to step out and fulfill.

However, if I was to be totally honest with myself, I think I might have a ‘postsecret’ too…

Many times in my life, I am caught between a love and hate relationship with being North American and privileged and living with integrity in light of what I now know. I didn’t grow up rich by Canadian standards, and I am definitely not rich now either. But there are many moments, every single day of my life, where the harsh reality hits me: this is not all that there is. And when those moments happen, I can’t shake them. I find myself wondering if I am becoming ‘too North American’ again. I wonder if I am getting too self-absorbed again, or too caught up in what I see in front of me. Am I doing enough? I mean, there are people all around the globe that are in dire trouble: in the midst of war, famine, exploitation, slavery, and pain. Am I really investing my time, money and resources as wisely as I could? Do I really believe what I say I believe about how valuable they are? Do I truly see them as my family, neighbours, and friends?

I have a lot of amazing friends here in Canada and all over the world. My circle of friends is often filled with people from opposite sides of the spectrum: old and young, single and married, millionaires and garbage dump refugees, Christians and Muslims, goody-two- shoes and bad a**, and yet, sometimes I wrestle with where reality is in the midst of this. I have friends who struggle with depression, yet seem to have it all together, and I have friends who I would have thought should have been depressed in their circumstances, and instead they are always thankful for whatever they have. I wish these friends could catch up with each other and share resources.

This morning, when I woke up, I had the luxury of lying in bed for a few moments and listening to my husband and cat snore beside me. I smiled to myself thinking about what a blessing it is to have a morning like this: I am safe, warm, loved, protected, and most of all, I have hope. And then, I remembered that in this moment, not all of my friends and acquaintances have this and I am reminded that there is more of life for me to live and give. This is my not-so-secret secret. Am I thankful I was born here? Yes. Do I sometimes get itchy feet here? Every day. My life has been so changed by the people I have met and the stories I have found myself in that I can’t go back to where I used to be; I am not that person anymore. I have been wrecked for normal life, and I now long for so much more…

This is me waving good bye to the girls in Mexico as we were waiting for the truck to be pulled out of the mud from 4Xing and I am responding to the call of the wild…and my bladder.

This entry was posted on Sunday, February 3rd, 2008 at 2:22 pm and is filed under Uncategorized. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.