This I Believe

“From Secret To Story”

I believe in telling one’s secrets. Emily Dickinson once wrote a line about how words derive their power from being spoken. For her, the unuttered word represents lost potential, a gift ungiven. I think many painful, closely-kept secrets are like this; they are untapped experiences, ossified pieces of life. But secrets can be transformed. They can be told; they can become stories. I believe I have the right and the obligation to turn my secrets into stories.

From ages fifteen to seventeen, while suffering from severe depression, I lived 150 miles away from home in a residential treatment center for extremely ill adolescents. A confluence of unfortunate circumstances had resulted in my placement there. I did not have a choice about going.

It was a confusing and frightening place to live. The violence I witnessed and the restrictions placed upon my freedoms often made me feel I had lost my dignity and integrity as a person. Eventually, I realized that the only way to maintain a sense of autonomy under these circumstances was to bear witness to the turmoil inside and around me. For two years, I watched, I listened, I thought, and I wrote it all down in my journals.

Thinking of my life as a story had helped me to survive, but once I left that place, I decided never to tell about it. I wanted those years not to have happened. But they had, and they manifested themselves in odd ways: in my conflicting excuses for where I had been, in the curious slang I used, even in my literature papers in college. Every novel I read seemed preoccupied with themes of madness, loss, shame, and subterfuge. My secret was everywere; it surrounded and trapped me. I see now how parasitic a secret can be, how it can sap the vitality and momentum of its host’s life. It has taken me ten years to understand that my life will have no new narrative until I let this one go.

I used to think I couldn’t tell this story until I had determined what it ultimately meant, what its take-home lesson was. I’ve since realized two things. First, that no experience in life has a fixed meaning. The significance of my past changes as I live on and add to it. I believe this fluidity of meaning makes me free; it is one of life’s great blessings. Second, my reading and teaching of literature have taught me that authors don’t have a monopoly on the meaning of their work. As a teller, I have the right and obligation to pass on this tale, but I’m not allowed to reduce it with a universal moral. Instead, I give my story to you. You have the right to interpret it as you see fit. Please take this as my gift.