It all started with a crazy idea in November of 2004.

I printed up 3,000 self-addressed postcards, just like this.

They were blank on one side, and on the other side I listed some simple instructions.

I asked people to anonymously share an artful secret they'd never told anyone before.

And I handed out these postcards randomly on the streets of Washington, D.C., not knowing what to expect.

But soon the idea began spreading virally.

People began to buy their own postcards and make their own postcards.

I started receiving secrets in my home mailbox

not just with postmarks from Washington, D.C.,

but from Texas, California, Vancouver, New Zealand, Iraq

Soon my crazy idea didn't seem so crazy

PostSecret.com is the most visited advertisement-free blog in the world

And this is my postcard collection today

You can see my wife struggling to stack a brick of postcards on a pyramid of over a half-million secrets.

What I'd like to do now is share with you a very special handful of secrets from that collection

starting with this one.

I found these stamps as a child, and I have been waiting all my life to have someone to send them to. I never did have someone.

Secrets can take many forms

They can be shocking or silly or soulful

They can connect us to our deepest humanity or with people we'll never meet.

(Laughter)

Maybe one of you sent this one in. I don't know.

This one does a great job of demonstrating the creativity that people have when they make and mail me a postcard

This one obviously was made out of half a Starbucks cup with a stamp and my home address written on the other side.

Dear Birthmother, I have great parents. I've found love. I'm happy

Secrets can remind us of the countless human dramas

of frailty and heroism, playing out silently in the lives of people all around us even now

Everyone who knew me before 9/11 believes I'm dead

I used to work with a bunch of uptight religious people,

so sometimes I didn't wear panties, and just had a big smile and chuckled to myself

(Laughter)

This next one takes a little explanation before I share it with you

I love to speak on college campuses and share secrets and the stories with students

And sometimes afterwards I'll stick around and sign books and take photos with students

And this next postcard was made out of one of those photos

And I should also mention that, just like today

at that PostSecret event, I was using a wireless microphone

Your mic wasn't off during sound check. We all heard you pee (Laughter)

This was really embarrassing when it happened,

until I realized it couldn't been worse. Right. You know what I'm saying.

Inside this envelope is the ripped up remains of a suicide note I didn't use

I feel like the happiest person on Earth (now.)

One of these men is the father of my son. He pays me a lot to keep it a secret (Laughter)

That Saturday when you wondered where I was, well, I was getting your ring

It's in my pocket right now

I had this postcard posted on the PostSecret blog two years ago on Valentine's Day

It was the very bottom, the last secret in the long column.

And it hadn't been up for more than a couple hours before I received this exuberant email from the guy who mailed me this postcard

And he said,

Frank, I've got to share with you this story that just played out in my life,He said

My knees are still shaking

He said, For three years, my girlfriend and I, we've made it this Sunday morning ritual

to visit the PostSecret blog together and read the secrets out loud

I read some to her, she reads some to me

He says, It's really brought us closer together through the years.

And so when I discovered that you had posted my surprise proposal to my girlfriend at the very bottom,

I was beside myself

And I tried to act calm, not to give anything away

And just like every Sunday, we started reading the secrets out loud to each other

He said, But this time it seemed like it was taking her forever to get through each one.

But she finally did. She got to that bottom secret, his proposal to her

And he said, She read it once and then she read it again

And she turned to him and said, Is that our cat? (Laughter)

And when she saw him, he was down on one knee, he had the ring out.

He popped the question, she said yes. It was a very happy ending.

So I emailed him back and I said,

Please share with me an image, something that I can share with the whole PostSecret community and let everyone know your fairy tale ending

And he emailed me this picture.(Laughter)

I found your camera at Lollapalooza this summer

I finally got the pictures developed and I'd love to give them to you

This picture never got returned back to the people who lost it

but this secret has impacted many lives, starting with a student up in Canada named Matty

Matty was inspired by that secret to start his own website,

a website called IFoundYourCamera.

Matty invites people to mail him digital cameras that they've found

memory sticks that have been lost with orphan photos

And Matty takes the pictures off these cameras and posts them on his website every week

And people come to visit to see if they can identify a picture they've lost

or help somebody else get the photos back to them that they might be desperately searching for.

This one's my favorite. (Laughter)

Matty has found this ingenious way to leverage the kindness of strangers

And it might seem like a simple idea, and it is,

but the impact it can have on people's lives can be huge

Matty shared with me an emotional email he received from the mother in that picture.

That's me, my husband and son. The other pictures are of my very ill grandmother

Thank you for making your site.

These pictures mean more to me than you know

My son's birth is on this camera. He turns four tomorrow

Every picture that you see there and thousands of others have been returned back to the person who lost it --

sometimes crossing oceans, sometimes going through language barriers.

This is the last postcard I have to share with you today

When people I love leave voicemails on my phone I always save them in case they die tomorrow

and I have no other way of hearing their voice ever again

When I posted this secret, dozens of people sent voicemail messages from their phones,

sometimes ones they'd been keeping for years, messages from family or friends who had died

They said that by preserving those voices and sharing them,

it helped them keep the spirit of their loved ones alive.

One young girl posted the last message she ever heard from her grandmother.

Secrets can take many forms

They can be shocking or silly or soulful

They can connect us with our deepest humanity or with people we'll never meet again.

Voicemail recording: First saved voice message

Grandma：♫ It's somebody's birthday today ♫ ♫

Somebody's birthday today ♫ ♫

The candles are lighted ♫ ♫ on somebody's cake ♫

♫ And we're all invited ♫ ♫ for somebody's sake

♫ You're 21 years old today

Have a real happy birthday, and I love you. I'll say bye for now.

FW: Thank you.(Applause)

June Cohen: Frank, that was beautiful, so touching.

Have you ever sent yourself a postcard? Have you ever sent in a secret to PostSecret?

I have one of my own secrets in every book

I think in some ways, the reason I started the project, even though I didn't know it at the time,

was because I was struggling with my own secrets.

And it was through crowd-sourcing, it was through the kindness that strangers were showing me,

that I could uncover parts of my past that were haunting me.

JC: And has anyone ever discovered which secret was yours in the book?

Has anyone in your life been able to tell?

FW: Sometimes I share that information, yeah.

(Laughter)

(Applause)