Last night’s release party was a blast. Photos to come. For now, I will impart to you the wisdom of the confessional. And I don’t mean the religious kind.

It started off as an exercise in investigative journalism. I was looking to find out some dirt, actually, which I realize is not quite the same thing and also slightly juvenile. But it’s true: I wanted to find out what people were confessing.

Some background: Keeping in line with R18’s SECRET theme, a confession booth was installed at the Hideout and staffed with listeners by the brains behind Vital 5, who run the Hideout itself. Complete with curtains, benches, and small lightbulbs shaped like candle flames, the booth managed to feel secluded and intimate even in the midst of a completely packed bar. Viewed as an exploration of the ways in which private guilt finds it’s way into hopefully cathartic expression, the booth is deemed a “public service,” thus presenting a curious and fascinating boundary between what we consider private and public. Think about it: does private revelation in a confidential setting really perform a kind of good in the public realm? I would argue yes, and I think many from last night’s party would concur.

And what if the setting turned out to be slightly less confidential than one would hope? What if one deceptively harmless blogger got a detailed report of the confessions? I have to admit, the original idea was to collect a list of people’s secrets and post them anonymously on this here blog. It was not my idea. But I loved it the minute I heard it.

Sadly enough, this won’t be happening. I changed my mind. I did get a little bit of dirt, but the anonymous factor lessened the excitement in that regard. And truly, if we’re being honest, other people’s secrets don’t sound that much different from the secrets you already know. I wonder if everybody has the same secrets. If everybody has the same secrets, then what are we all worried about? Somebody should ask a priest. Anybody know a priest?

In lieu of dishing the gossip, my time in the confession booth turned out to be, well, quite like a confession. Unexpectedly, I found myself talking about things that I never would have realized were on my mind, though in retrpospect I realize that of course they were on my mind. It was a rather casual conversation, very open and two sided. We found ourselves sharing stories from the past, talking about places we’d both been, places we wanted to go to, and general experiences that we found we had in common. Thinking back on it, there really wasn’t anything that I actually confessed, yet somehow, I pulled the curtain aside and left feeling…lighter.

And now I am left wondering about all the other conversations that took place in there that night. Some people must have brought with them memories of the Catholic kind, and others may have really needed to get something off their chests. A priest or a therapist would be in a position of power, I think, since they have the license to absolve and decode. But what was going on in this booth? There was a distinct absence of hierarchy, that’s for certain. No one had the power to do anything, really, except talk to each other like two human beings who are paying attention.

And maybe that is how it becomes a successful public service. Getting people to pay attention is not an easy thing, especially when it involves paying attention to another human being (screens are easier). And you feel better having done it. Your secret is irrelevant; it’s only that you have it and know when it’s time to tell.