“I stole your duck and took him to San Francisco.”

Does the phrase strike you as deeply powerful? Probably not, but stay with me. That simple sentence is someone’s secret. Someone decided to write it on a postcard; along with the carefully decorated mail of dozens of others, it appeared on a blog one Sunday morning.

When a friend told me about Post Secret, I was skeptical. For one, the web site described itself as an “ongoing community art project,” which, frankly, sounded a little ridiculous. I expected to find an assortment of sappy postcards with little cutouts of bleeding hearts. What I found instead was a collection of surprisingly candid thoughts that seemed more like slices of life than anything. Some secrets are funny; some are gloomy; a few, I’ve found, hit close enough to home to make you squirm. Either way, this “community art project” is thriving: it has inspired a book series, a music video by the All American Rejects and, yes—even a Facebook page. So if you haven’t heard of the blog, you might want to check it out.

The secrets add a nice touch to dull Sundays, but one question in particular keeps me coming back. What compels a person to tell the world his secret? Well, there’s the “duh” answer: it’s cathartic. But think deeper—what is so cathartic about anonymously sending off your greatest concerns to a Web site, and having no way of knowing who will see them? The action brings little definite closure. People may respond to certain postcards by e-mail, but more often than not, one’s letter is simply left alone.

Still, I can’t deny that Post Secret manages to feel a lot more personal than 99 percent of web sites I can think of. These days, you can put any old thing on the internet and rest assured that it will affect very few people; in spite of this trend, Post Secret makes every little sentence count. The blog, while convenient to find, still requires contributors to use that arcane institution known as the U.S. Postal Service. There’s something about seeing a secret in human handwriting that makes you feel connected. Likewise, writing your secret down and sending it off with the mailman feels much more vulnerable than typing an error-riddled message and hastily clicking submit. Post Secret may be an internet confessional, but it has an old school feel. It’s comforting to know that some things on the World Wide Web are still treated carefully.

I haven’t felt the urge to send off a postcard just yet, and as far as I know, none of my friends have considered it. That doesn’t stop me from checking every Sunday and wondering if maybe, just maybe, one of the secrets came from someone I just got off the phone with.