PostSecret is a website where people can mail in a secret of theirs on an anonymous postcard for everyone else to see. They can be funny, poignant, sad, and sometimes downright scary and disturbing. You can read more about it on Wikipedia.
I first read about PostSecret on cnn.com and have read a lot of submissions since then. It can be very addictive, mostly because it is 100% raw humanity. Out of the hundreds if not thousands that I have read, I only care to remember one of them, and it is pictured below. It reads “Sometimes I wish for the Apocalypse… Just to see what I’m really made of.”
For many years, I was angry. I’d often walk down the street hoping someone would for some reason, any reason, pick a fight with me. I would wish they would have something to say about the clothes I was wearing or where I was shopping or how I was walking. I wished they would hurt me. And every time I wished, I also had prepared a response to defend myself, to show them that they couldn’t hurt me because I was ready for them.
I would also wonder if I had the physicality to deal with such a confrontation, as I’ve always been slim. I once had a friend who was also slight of build, and he said of himself that he didn’t have much size but he had “berserker rage”. I myself never had such confidence (in either him or me). Yet still, I wondered.
Today, I view that unspoken desire for a proving ground as being based in having been hurt too much, and also a lack of self-esteem. I don’t know that I could manage a tough situation, and I don’t think others think I could either. I still want praise and recognition. And I even think I still want to be hurt, or at least for someone to try to hurt me. It is such a deeply-ingrained part of me, I assume most people must feel the same thing, even though I know that’s not true.
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Check out what the iMDb has to say about apocalypse.
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