Twenty years ago, before TikTok and Instagram and the concept of “doomscrolling,” websites like PostSecret felt like a raw, authentic slice of the then-adolescent internet. The site, which miraculously still exists in 2024, features a hand-picked collection of anonymous postcards written by people from around the world, who divulge their deepest, darkest secrets in just a few words or lines.
In an article for the literary magazine Hazlitt, journalist and essayist Meg Bernhard holds PostSecret up to the light two decades after its founding, both profiling the man who created it and examining the website’s role in her own life growing up. “For a while,” she writes, “PostSecret was my secret.”
“I remember the glow of the monitor in the dark upstairs hallway, the feeling of the mouse under my hand as I scrolled through secrets,” she writes of her childhood in Temecula, California. “I remember the padding of feet on stairs, the quick click of the X. Browser window vanished.”
Bernhard first started thinking about PostSecret again roughly a year ago, she told The Sunday Long Read, and reached out to creator Frank Warren to get the full story.
“I’m really interested in intimacy, and the stuff that we keep to ourselves, and the stuff we reveal to others in the process of grieving and experiencing loss,” she said.
Aside from digging into internet culture of the early 2000s, the stories that Bernhard writes as a freelancer span many worlds — from the daily routine of an Elvis impersonator during a heat wave, to the history and power structures behind the making of wine, to cowboy poetry and those who write it in Nevada.
“I’m so curious about so many things that to dwell in one thematic space for too long would probably start to feel less interesting to me,” Bernhard said. “But I don’t know, I’ll probably still have the same questions for my whole life.”
Bernhard is based in Las Vegas, and her work has appeared in The New York Times Magazine, The New Yorker, Harper’s, The Virginia Quarterly Review, and elsewhere. Her first book, “Wine,” with Bloomsbury’s Object Lessons series, was published last year.
The following interview has been lightly edited for brevity and clarity.
In this story about PostSecret and its founder, you talk about your own experience reading through the website as a teenager. I’m curious if, at that time, you remember any particular secrets sticking out to you the most? Were they the ones about relationships, or family, or something else?
I don’t know if I remember any particular secrets. But at the time I was reading PostSecret, there were all these other websites of the mid-2000s, like fml.com and My Life is Average and Tumblr. Like I say in the story, because my family didn’t really talk much about relationships or sex or bodies, or sort of bigger existential questions, the internet was the place that I learned more about other people.
With PostSecret, I feel like I was mostly interested in sort of angsty, adolescent-type postcards, because that’s what I could relate to. I don’t remember anything in particular, but it was people saying things like, “I’m so bored in my town,” and “I’m just trying to leave” and “No one understands me,” and those sorts of things. Then sex and drugs and alcohol were all sort of curious to me, since I didn’t know anything about those things. But I feel like I was mostly looking for secrets that I could relate to.
When I went to look up PostSecret after reading your story, I was shocked that it still exists on the internet after all this time.
It’s amazing. It does feel like a product of the early mid-2000s internet, and reading it now in the age of Instagram and TikTok, it feels weird. It feels sort of out of time.
How do you think about your own experience online during the early 2000s, compared to the experience of a teenager on the internet today?
Frank and I talked about this a good amount, in terms of how polished and curated online content is now. So much of the internet now is social media, and so much of social media is performance. None of this idea is new, but [the internet] feels less organic, and maybe less truthful and less honest and less raw, then some of that early internet stuff. Aside from maybe Reddit and other forums, earnestness is gone from the internet. And it felt like when I was reading PostSecret and others, all the people posting these things weren’t in it to present a certain image of themselves, or to get feedback on that image. They’re in it because they’re turning to the open internet to try to process something, and then you can make a little community out of that. And that’s really delightful. Not to say that form of the internet is perfect, but it feels a little kinder and more honest than the internet today.
To me, it feels like the internet 20 years ago was just a piece of life, and you could untether yourself from it. And now you can’t really do that.
Yeah totally, it’s like the internet has become selfhood. And gosh, I think about this all the time, because while I’m not an especially brand-oriented journalist — I’m really bad at Twitter and on Instagram I share the stories that I write — but every once in a while I step back and think, “If some random person were to only read my stories, and only see my Instagram and my Twitter, what sort of image would they create from that? How would they envision who I am as a person?” I try not to think about that, because I don’t want to start unintentionally feeding into that idea of image creation, but it is weird to think that if you only know me over the internet, you’re going to have a really particular version of me. But the whole of me can’t be communicated through just my stuff on the internet.
At the end of this story, you talk about Frank’s relationship with his own mother and how he doesn’t really want to get into every element of it with you. Do you think he should write his own secret postcard about that relationship? Or do you think there are some things that are better left being “dark matter,” as you both talk about?
It’s a good question. I guess it would be up to him. My brain tends to work in a way where, like Frank, I’m constantly analyzing things, constantly wondering how much of ourselves we can really make public — that we can never fully know another person, and we can never fully be known. So in some ways there’s always going to be that “dark matter.” We’re just never going to be able to reveal ourselves to other people fully. And there’s so much about ourselves that we just don’t know.
Frank has written his own postcards anonymously and included them in different places. He doesn’t indicate which secrets are his. So I think he gets a little bit of that catharsis. And it was also a good lesson for me. In the sort of journalism I do, I’m not reporting on powerful figures who are accountable to the public. With most of the people I write about, it’s such a privilege for me that they’re sharing their story, and I want to make sure they’re always feeling comfortable and that they trust me and that they know the implications of having their personal story published. I never want to push too hard, to the point where someone feels uncomfortable revealing things to me. And maybe I don’t even need to know, maybe some things are better left unknown.
I’m constantly analyzing things, constantly wondering how much of ourselves we can really make public — that we can never fully know another person, and we can never fully be known.
Meg Bernhard
With Frank, he did tell me a lot about his mom. But at a certain point, I think he just felt like maybe this is enough. We got to a point where he probably felt like, “You know what you know, and there’s no more you need to know.” And I was fine with that.
Can you walk me through your career evolution thus far? How did you make freelancing work so quickly after graduating?
I love listening to people talk about their careers, because I think every freelance magazine journalist career is so weird and happens by such chance. And mine happened also because of chance. The summer after I graduated, I was an intern with the L.A. Times and that was awesome. And then I moved to Spain; I got a travel grant from Harvard, where I went to undergrad, and it was this crazy, open-ended grant where they gave me money to sort of do whatever I wanted. My project that I had proposed was to go live on vineyards and learn about wine. I was like, “Why did they give a 21-year-old all that money to go hang out and drink wine?” That ended up being obviously amazing. There’s a small part of my work that is wine writing. I don’t think of myself as a wine writer, but that’s changed my career in a lot of ways. So I was freelancing in Europe — Spain and Belgium — mostly for the L.A. Times doing daily news stuff, but I always knew that I wanted to do magazine work and started doing magazine-esque pieces here and there, including for The Sunday Long Read.
I moved to Belgium in 2019 for graduate school, but then I quit grad school when Covid happened. I’m really bad at going to grad school. I’ve tried to go to grad school so many times, but I think it’s just not meant to be. Every time I’m like, “Oh, freelancing is so much better than this.” I decided to return to the U.S., which I had not intended; I thought I was going to be abroad for many more years. So I was sort of bummed out about coming back to the U.S. and was in my parents house in California. Then I bought a car and just started driving around the country, and I was getting great pandemic unemployment from California. That was really helpful in making me excited about being in the U.S. again, because I just drove through places that I had never seen before and realized how big and interesting and beautiful the country was.
I was interested in death and loss and grief before, because I had a friend who died when I was in college and I was always thinking about her and thinking about writing about her and the experience of losing someone at 18. And when Covid happened, it felt like collectively we were asking a lot of questions about mourning and grief that I had been asking for a while. So it felt pretty natural to report on death during the pandemic. Those first few years of the pandemic, I was writing a lot about Covid death and how we mourn collectively as a society.
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What would be your tip for breaking into a new outlet that you haven’t written for before?
Yeah it’s hard. The past several years, writing-wise, I’ve developed some pretty close relationships with my editors and that’s been so cool. It’s sort of rare now that I’m doing one-off pieces for publications. It’s been a lot of cultivating a relationship with an editor, where we’re talking about bunches of story ideas together and tons of them will get rejected, but maybe one of them will get accepted. Having that trust and long-term relationship is really helpful.
Every magazine has a different approach and style and sensibility. And it’s sort of hard to articulate what that is sometimes. My suggestion would be to read really widely and read the publications that you’re interested in pitching, which feels obvious. But I used to just pitch the same story over and over again to different publications. Something that is a New Yorker story might be pretty different from how Harper’s, or The New York Times Magazine, would approach it. Even in the pitch, I find it useful to try to adopt just some degree of the style of the magazine that you’re pitching, because then that makes it easier for the editor to envision that story being in their magazine. Now, certainly it’s easier because I have more of a track record of publication. In the beginning, yeah, it felt like I was pitching and pitching and pitching and I had no history so why would anyone trust me. The tip is that it doesn’t happen all at once. It takes a long time, so be patient!
What advice would you give to a younger or college journalist who’s thinking about freelancing?
Develop reporting skills, work for a newspaper, or intern for a newspaper. A lot of freelancers come into the work without having done newspaper work, but I find that developing basic reporting skills at a newspaper is so wonderful. Read a lot — read all the magazines, read fiction, read non-fiction, that’s the best way to learn. And if you find a good editor who pays attention to you, who gives great feedback, hold onto that editor for dear life. My writing has gotten so much better entirely because of my editors, those are the people who I learned from the most.
Amanda Ulrich
Amanda is an award-winning journalist and editor based in Southern California. She has written about tiny, off-the-grid communities in the desert; the unsolved cases of missing and murdered Indigenous women in the U.S.; the aftermath of a category five Caribbean hurricane; the entire towns forced to flee from California’s rampant wildfires; and hundreds of other stories in between.
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