All of us live in apparent duality. We are fragmented, outwardly as well as inwardly. We are separate. We are connected. We are one way in private, another in public. We think things we do not say, we say things we do not mean. We hide things from ourselves and from others. We have secrets… deep, dark secrets that we don’t want others to learn and that we don’t want to look at too closely.
What if our lives were an open book? No. Really. An open book. What if the things we thought and the things we felt could be put out there for others to comment on and react to without censure? What if all of our secrets were hung out for anyone to see? Could we do it? Could we step away from the need to be seen a certain way, to be liked, valued, admired, and trusted? Could we do it? Could I?
Half of my life has been spent trying to figure out who I am and the other half has been spent learning to like the person I tell myself I am. For me, the journey has been difficult. Hell, who am I kidding? The journey is still difficult, partly because it’s so freaking hard to be honest with myself and with other people about who I am and partly because who I am is so complicated that even Nietzsche would throw up his hands in despair of ever sorting it out.
My reality is such that my secrets have the potential to cause a lot of harm. Other people could be hurt, a lot of other people. I’m not famous or rich; although, I can say that I have managed to accumulate an enormous amount of debt, an almost incomprehensible amount of debt, and that kind of puts me in a category of my own that few people will ever come close to matching in their lifetimes. Ordinary people don’t usually screw up things as monumentally as I do, so I suppose that makes my life extraordinary or at least not exactly ordinary. On the surface, things look good, but I know that I live in a house of cards. A gentle breeze could easily cause it all to come crumbling down… and if it all comes crumbling down, people could get hurt.
So I ask myself, is it possible to be honest with myself and and others and still protect the ones I love? What if I reveal my deepest thoughts, my deepest fears, my deepest hopes, my deepest dreams, my dirtiest secrets without overtly revealing my identity?
Can an effort begun in deception result in the discovery of truth, my truth? Would such a project be doomed to failure, sort of like trying to understand the nature of ice by studying fire? Or might I find some kind of liberation, some kind of freedom, through the process of throwing darts in the general direction of truth and hoping that some of them will hit the target? Well, the only way to find out is to try. I am experimenting. I am turning myself inside out with the hope that catharsis will lead to congruence and congruence to peace. Here goes...
