Notes on a Secret

or rather, what it means to carry something that should never have been yours.

last week, i told a secret i’ve been holding alone for 20 years.

—

i woke up after not enough hours of sleep, deeply, suddenly sad. perhaps not ‘suddenly’ - a conversation with a friend the night before had shaken some things up that i don’t think about often, but when disrupted, can take time and effort to put to rest again.

that rest is always temporary.

i’ve been asked by people who are wrapped in their own guilt, who are impatient, who are not also carrying this secret, too, why i don’t just ‘grow up’, ‘let it go’, why am i ‘still letting it affect’ me?

what they don’t understand is that once you know something, it can’t be unknown.

im not ‘letting’ it affect me. i’ve been trying not to let it infect anyone else.

—

there’s a common, dismissive stereotype that people who study psychology¹ do it because we’re fucked up ourselves.

that sounds like an on-brand conclusion in a society that is obsessed with idealizing individuality and punishing aberration, one that is based on binaries like ‘right & wrong’ and ‘crime & punishment’, but is unwilling to look at the patterns and practices that lead to the outcomes we supposedly hate so much, let alone truly devote ourselves to changed behavior. it’s too scary or difficult. not our responsibility. or even worse, it infringes on our ‘individuality’.

but the people who want to study what to do when harm comes to pass, or even how it happens so it can be prevented or so we can be prepared, those people get ridiculed. (in many fields and about many topics. see disabled/mad folks and healthcare…)

the reality is this: in a society built and sustained on trauma and violence (the ongoing g*noc*des of multiple groups of people, and attempts to eradicate the knowledge and practices we carry within our lineages), everyone has some degree of maladaptation that they have developed to survive.

none of us is getting out of this unscathed. and nothing stays hidden forever.

the sooner we realize this and get our emotional and interpersonal weight up, become proactive in taking care of ourselves and each other, the more ready we will be collectively as things continue to come to light.

ready to hold each other. ready to understand and carry out transformative processes. ready to have resources and refuge available. ready to process difficult, awful information…and continue forward.

but to ask people to do something that they’ve never learned how to do in a context that is ill-prepared, and in fact, actively discourages them from doing so, is unkind, isolating, and only exacerbates the harms we experience and believe must be borne alone. and we are never truly alone. that lie is just another illness spreading from one person to the next.

my multiple chronic illnesses span my mind and body, and are directly connected to my trauma history. im no neurologist, but i paid enough attention in my cognitive psych courses to understand the areas of the brain and where things like mood, language, visual memory, fear, excitement, and other core aspects of personhood are, as well as developmental stages, basic neurology, etc.

i didn’t only study western conceptualizations, cause i was raised better than to limit myself to the baseline of a white man’s mind, but that’s another set of posts.

anyway, i have epilepsy in my frontal temporal lobe, and the point of origin is my mood and emotional regulation center. they spread, strangely, over to the left side of my brain, into my visual cortex. since my memory is partially eiditic (photographic), i have particular trouble with my language, memory, and communication. the doctors insist that my language and comprehension are still in the 96th percentile, which they think is miraculous, but that’s because they don’t know what my mind was like before it shorted out.

it took three years after onset to fully crash, and once i did, i spent nine months in bed sick, depressed, and unable to speak. people think i have epilepsy, but i don’t just have that:

i have epilepsy, and

i have c-ptsd, major depression, and anxiety, and

i have been housing unstable, underemployed, and working poor for most of my adult life, and

im a community worker who is has a rare skillset that is necessary and undervalued, and,

im a survivor of almost a decade of abuse, and before that…

the secrets.

it’s like my bodymind (and amygdala) tapped out from being on loud for so long. i was good at hiding, and since hyperproductivity was normal for me and convenient for everyone else…

—

i hadn’t planned on ever telling anyone my secret. mostly because it’s not just mine to tell, but also because i couldn’t see anything good coming from it. i could only imagine someone else feeling as increasingly confused and isolated as i have these past 20 years, and for what? so i won’t feel alone? seemed selfish.

but last week, i received my birthday gift from my best friend. she and i are side by side in the matrix vat. im the sailor pluto to her sailor saturn, and we’re basically in each other’s minds as much as we’re in each other’s hearts. we’ve loved each other through some rough shit.

she bought me something to make it easier to read, for us to read together, and as i was looking at it, i started getting brain foggy and remembered that i had been up early, and then why i had been up so early, and my mind started tumbling as i realized that i couldn’t do it alone anymore. i asked her if she had the capacity for something difficult and i whispered it out for the first time ever.

it was the most terrifying relief. i finally felt safe.

and then i felt terrified all over again.

—

i was so worried i had hurt her.

but she reassured me that i did my best, and i did the right things because i asked and she was able to check in with herself, too. she never lies to me. in fact, she is so gentle and clear with the most difficult truths that it’s hard for me to dismiss her.

she said that even if it had hurt, it’s okay because that’s what our friendship is for - for us to bear things together. to journey together. that’s why we found each other and will always have each other.

this is what choice is for. she would choose me again and again.

—

being a survivor is scary because you both know and don’t know what you’re capable of. when certain terrible things seem normal to you, it can feel like being made of sharp edges. even when people think im beautiful or interesting, i want to warn them before they get too close. (i am currently imagining myself as an obsidian construct…)

when i recorded this, it was early in the morning again, and my throat was raw. but it felt like something had passed through that needed to go. keeping that secret wasn’t doing me any good, and neither was expecting myself to eventually know what to do with it when no one else before me had. i did figure it out, though. we did it.²

im the last one to carry this thing, and im not just ‘letting it go’.

i’ve released it into love.

may it never hurt anyone ever again.

1. used here broadly as a practice of learning to understand and support the mental, emotional, and spiritual well-being of people and communities in a holistic, culturally-sound manner. none of that western diagnose&drug shit here.

2. thank you to the writing of Clementine Morrigan and Martha Southgate for helping me to understand my survivorship and the weight of secrets and shame.