Outing

by DRM

Secrets are dan­ger­ous things.

My grand­mother hid behind her secrets. She car­ried them every­where. When she fought with my mother, she’d sit on the couch look­ing shat­tered. “It isn’t that bad, grandma,” I’d say.  She’d look away, whis­per­ing in a quaky voice, ‘You can’t know how bad it is, Danny,’. When I got older and had wit­nessed the wide scope of mis­deeds that con­form to the norm, I pressed her. “Come on, your secret can’t be that bad.”  “I’ve done the most hor­ri­ble things,” she’d say.

My father cloaked his weak­ness and folly in his secrets. He’d hint at things that he knew about him­self, his life, his chil­dren, as if he had got­ten a look at a clas­si­fied doc­u­ment that explained every­thing. “I worry about your sis­ter,” he’d tell me, imply­ing some­how that we had a respon­si­bil­ity to watch out for her, but when I asked why, he’d just say, “I just am more con­cerned about her, I can’t really say why.”

Those secrets kept me won­der­ing for too long about things that I couldn’t know, spec­u­lat­ing about the veil of hid­den knowl­edge and how I could pierce it.

What I didn’t know then is that you make your own secrets. They are a cell that you con­struct around your soul, the place you erect the bar­ri­ers of Self and Impor­tance and Hurt and Fear. When I got into my own life I said to myself, No secrets. When I had chil­dren, I said to them, No secrets. And at the times in my life that I real­ized that I was orga­niz­ing my life around secrets, I changed my life

Last night talk­ing with T. I real­ized that I’d ended up with a secret at the core of my life, and that pro­tect­ing that secret was becom­ing the pur­pose, rather than doing the thing that the secret was meant to cre­ate room for.

In order to help me make space to write and to develop a cre­ative iden­tity that had been hid­den too long and defined too clum­sily, I made this place on the web under a pseu­do­nym. I started to develop rela­tion­ships with writ­ers and artists in Twit­ter under a pseu­do­nym. The anonymity gave me a chance to stretch a lit­tle, be defined by what I could do, not by who I had made myself in my adult life.

Writ­ing under a pseu­do­nym is some­thing prac­ti­cal and man­age­able. But cre­at­ing rela­tion­ships under a pseu­do­nym is ulti­mately decep­tive and dam­ag­ing. How can one sus­tain rela­tion­ships with another with any authen­tic­ity while main­tain­ing anonymity? You have entered into the rela­tion­ship with con­trol. You’ve deter­mined what can be done and not known. You won’t allow the other to dis­cover you. You won’t allow the other to truly eval­u­ate you.

So, today I undid the veil of anonymity. I put my name on my Twit­ter pro­file. I changed the expla­na­tion on my About page here.

I’m Dan McCarthy. This is my per­sonal blog. I’m a writer. And I’m going to have to be authen­tic to write with authen­tic­ity. As long as I want to par­tic­i­pate in the cre­ative com­mu­nity on the web, I need to present myself as myself. I’ll still pub­lish with a pseu­do­nym — to the degree I can get pub­lished, that is. But for the peo­ple who know me, in the dig­i­tal world and the ana­log world, it’s impor­tant that I acknowl­edge who I am, openly and with­out worry.