Bare your secrets on a public ‘confession board’ in Seattle

Secrets. We often keep them buried deep down inside, afraid that we’ll be judged or abandoned by the people in our lives if we reveal too much. But thanks to a new, public “confession board,” Seattleites are getting things off their chests.

“I know my ex’s Facebook password. I login at least once a week,” Anthony Jacobellis reads off some of the anonymous confessions from the Confession Board he helped create. “I am very bad at quitting heroine. I have hit three pedestrians with my car. Oops.”

The confession board is a six foot by ten foot board covered in hooks.

“You walk up and you take a card, you just write [a confession] on it and you place it in a shoe box,” Jacobellis said. “The next person who writes one, when they put it in they take one out and they hang it up. So that way you’re not looking over the person’s shoulder who’s writing it.”

Jacobellis is one of the founders of a storytelling website called Sondry, and they’re the people who set up the confession board around town.

“We have done Green Lake a couple times, Red Square, and different areas on the U[W campus] a couple of times, Kerry Park. We’ve been wanting to do Westlake Center but haven’t gotten to it yet.”

The board only pops up sporadically, since they learned the hard way they need a permit to have it up in a public space. And they never make any announcements about it online. You just have to stumble across it. But when it’s up, people flock to it, and scribble down their confessions.

“This is the one that I’ve gone back to the most, out of any one that I always talk about,” Jacobellis said. “‘I hate that my wife kept her affair a secret until after she had breast cancer and a mastectomy and before her chemo.'”

Some say Seattle is not a religious city, so perhaps without a priest to anonymously confess to, the only other place is online.

“It’s so easy to sit behind a screen, so bringing it to a physical space was really, really important because you’re surrounded by other people,” Jacobellis said. “You’re not in a dark room on a computer, or on your couch or on your phone. That way people can really, really relate to what’s going on around them and see that no, these are real people. There are faces behind these thoughts and these confessions and it really brings a ton of empathy to the situation and it’s super impactful.”

It feels good to confess, but Jecobellis notes the readers get the most out of the experiment.

“You never realize how impactful your story can be until after it’s told,” he said. “You never know what impact you can make with sharing your life experience with others.”

“Seeing all of these up at the same time, you totally realize how many problems people have in common,” Jacobellis said. “At the same time there is still a twist on every single one of these that makes them entirely different from the next person. It’s a very human experience, there’s something that kind of bonds us.”

So what kind of experiences and confessions have shown up on the board? Jacobellis reads:

“I took an Uber to McDonald’s last night.”

“My glasses are not really prescription.”

“My best friend is marrying someone that I hate.”

“I haven’t seen my mom, who is mentally ill, in two years and I somehow feel responsible that she fell ill.”

“I give rude customers decaf.”