Texas Confessional is an unusual art project, in that it's designed primarily to benefit the participants rather than an audience. In its physical form, Texas Confessional is a small black chapbook made up of actual anonymous confessions. These regrets are submitted online and then compiled and printed by editor/publisher Ty Harvey.
Only 100 copies of the books are made, and they're scattered around the state for strangers to find and read. Harvey strives to place the books in places where he believes they'll be read with some consideration rather than just skimmed and set aside. If you seek one out, you're unlikely to find one (there are 100 books and a little over 26 million Texas residents, so the odds aren't in your favor), but that's kind of the point. Harvey hopes that finding a confessional will be like seeing a shooting star or spotting a four leaf clover.
The main impetus for the project isn't to give random people something interesting to read, though. If folks read the confessions and are moved by them or learn a lesson, that's great, but it's not the primary goal of Texas Confessional. The real motivation of the project is to give people an opportunity to express a regret in a way that's tangible but does not open their confession to the world at large. Harvey hopes that sharing a painful memory or a regret with the knowledge that it will be read by somebody somewhere will give the confessor "hope that it's not all bad, no matter how bad it is."
Share your regret with Texas Confessional
