Big Dipper

I write this blog and I tell you about me, but I don’t often reveal my secrets. That said, I have revealed some here, which for a guy like me, is remark­able. Most secrets are deadly, at least for me. I am not advo­cat­ing spilling every­thing that I have done or thought, but I am advo­cat­ing for liv­ing a life more transparent.

Hav­ing done the oppo­site, lived a life with many rab­bit holes of secrets, it is exhaust­ing and it leads to bizarre behav­ior. I have hurt peo­ple who trusted me because I lied to them. In order to cope with the secret life, Ie looked for relief in sub­stances or processes that led to destruc­tion. At the heart of addic­tions is secrets, I believe. They rob me of time (most impor­tant “pos­ses­sion” I have), integrity (doing the right thing when no one is around) and free­dom (abil­ity to live with the lux­ury of choices). Secrets seem to gen­er­ate shame which is the root prob­lem. By shame I mean the belief that I am intrin­si­cally no good. Maybe shame gen­er­ates the secrets. Doesn’t mat­ter, together they are a ham­ster wheel of despair.

Get­ting bet­ter means shin­ing light in the cor­ners and telling my own truth. I am not talk­ing about the Ulti­mate Truth as its writ­ten in the stars or your favorite scrip­ture or as it is told to you by legit­i­mate experts or quacks who look at stars or scrip­tures. I am talk­ing about the sim­ple, pow­er­ful words that state who I am, where I am, what I do, what I believe and how I feel. My truth. I don’t do this all the time, and some­times the truth is a process of under­stand­ing, but when I get to it I know it is real because it has the feel­ing of being intrin­sic to me. When I live in a lie or in con­fu­sion, it feels for­eign and I start look­ing around for relief. Remov­ing secrets reduces shame and makes for the trans­par­ent life. There is a turn­ing point going from secrets to truth. It is like cells of truth are added to me to replace cells of secrecy. At some point I am no longer the same per­son. I am able to tell my truth most of the time even though I still have some secrecy cells left. On bal­ance, I am a dif­fer­ent man than I was. Amazing.

Exam­ple: I was molested by Rob­bie the life­guard at the local pool at the park down the street in Cor­pus Christi. That was an awful event for a lit­tle boy. I held it as a secret and added many more sim­i­lar secrets to that one try­ing to uncon­sciously work it out. When I finally real­ized how much space Rob­bie was occu­py­ing in my psy­che, and how much dam­age I had caused as a result, I was grief-stricken. Even­tu­ally I was able to talk about the story and even did a photography/writing exhibit around it last year. Through that and through the help of many friends I have been able to let go of that event and of all the labels that came after it and which plagued me for a long time. Now when I think back I see those events as some­thing that hap­pened. I don’t see them as the deep dark hole in my life that I once did. Talk­ing about it actu­ally helped. The secrets scat­tered when the lights came on.