Part of the inspiration to open my blog to others’ secrets is knowing that I have an enjoyable release for my secrets: I get to work with them through fiction. Not everyone has that joy, so why not share my space?
Some secrets we keep, some secrets keep us. After a few secret-intensive years in my twenties and a lot of nonsense, I am not really big on keeping secrets. It is something I try very hard to avoid. Still, I have four, and now that I think about it, they all really can be reduced down to one.
I’ve sent out my last tweets and facebook statuses requesting peoples’ secrets, but before I reactivate Google Analytics, here is my big secret, stripped of all the fiction.
There is this quiet darkness that got handed down on my father’s side. For years I thought it was me, and my trifecta of moodiness – I got a writer’s brain, the loner tendencies of an only child, and a big fat IQ. At the same time, I have long said that I am the happiest person I know, which is a fairly bold statement considering I spend a lot of time in yoga studios. People close to me know that while I can be insufferably grumpy a lot of the time, I’m also very happy. And now that I think of it, I am a lot less grumpy than I used to be.
Anyway, there is this quiet darkness, this sort of simmering discontent that lives in part of my father’s family, and it shows up in lots of different ways. I’m not even sure how to put words to it, it’s just there in some of us, and I know of only one person who knows that part of the family well enough to see it. For my father, it was / is a constant striving for bigger, better, more, with some good old fashioned rage thrown in from time to time because the world just isn’t good enough. At the same time, he is very sensitive, has a huge heart, and takes great joy in helping other people. So, there is always something about him that doesn’t quite parse unless you’re willing to get a little zen about it. He is an unusual guy.
For me, it’s a lack of engagement, a tendency to keep everyone in the world at arm’s length. It is why I haven’t cried at the most joyful events in my life, but yesterday morning the beauty in the pattern of rust on the gas cap of the old truck next to me in traffic made me weepy every time I thought about it for hours. This disconnect and the restlessness that it foments have led me into circumstances that have completely beat the crap out of me, and driven me to cheat in all of my relationships (except with Scott, which started as an affair), even relationships with people I loved very deeply. It was always so much easier to connect with pain than with anything else. If I couldn’t find joy with other people, at least pain was something to feel. I have broken my own heart innumerable times.
I am luckier in some ways than my father – I had lots of early years of exposure to different kinds of relationships, Eastern philosophy, meditation, and so on, so I know there are other ways to engage with the world. There is a light path and there is a dark path, and I have come a long, long way, but dammit, sometimes I really miss the dark path. It has fed my writing like nothing else, and withdrawing into big messes -around moves, jobs, affairs, whatever- has taught me plenty about the world. I guess the secret for me, really, is not that I can’t let go of the darkness, it is that sometimes I really don’t want to.
So, that’s my big secret, the one from which all the others spring: despite my trajectory toward love, light, and happiness, I don’t want to let go of the darkness. That is my struggle, that is the friction that has been there in every moment of my life. But, as I sit here and think it through – I started this post hours ago and knew I needed to let it sit – that darkness has served me well, and I do need to hang on to at least some of it. After all, it is the place from which the desire for connection, love, and all of those things I keep at arm’s length arise. I’m about to get all Taoist about it, so I’ll pause here. I think I just figured out how I ended up with the tattoo I have, twelve years after the fact. Artistically, it is not a very good tattoo - the yin in my yang and the yang in my yin are really out of balance. How fitting.
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