The Secret Stories: Revealing What Could Not Be Told

One of the things I enjoy most about storytelling is that it almost always contains a secret. While there are those that say a lie is a proper response to inappropriate curiosity, I’m fascinated by the secret whys and hows, the reasons that we can’t quite share in public.

Twelve Step programs have made it popular to say we are as sick as our secrets. I’ve done a fair amount of Twelve Step (OA) and have deep respect for the program in all it’s forms. But they create a safe space for a secret shared.

So in this world of Facebook, where we all see pictures of what our friends are eating, what thing their cat did this afternoon, and where they’re currently buying underwear, perhaps we need less information, rather than more.

But I still want to know the secret reasons behind things. So I’ll share my current one with you. I’ve been out of writing while I recovered from knee surgery.

Is that secret? Good God no. I simply have a do not whine policy for myself online if I can help it. Whining is not a secret, it’s a public temper tantrum. I have them, But I try to keep them to a minimum. And in the end of it all, I will be able to walk for the first time in over seven years in minimal pain. YEA!

But it’s left me not wanting to share the whiny parts about surgery. Want to see my scar? I didn’t think so.

The secrets left in old stories are different. They’re kept perhaps for safety, perhaps for dignity, perhaps because they simply couldn’t be told, no matter what. Those interest me most because they are a measure of social change. No one is shocked anymore by a child out of wedlock, or a secret love. But those were deep secrets that had to be kept at the time, for everyone’s world to work.

I’m most interested by the secrets of history. The Russian revolution only makes sense if you know there was a fatally ill male child in line for the succession. The image of Thomas Jefferson is vastly changed by the story of Sallie Hemmings. These things make history real.

So when I wrote The Storyteller, I wrote about women with a story they could not tell at the time, a thing kept secret and yet preserved in story. Are they healed in the remembrance? I hope so. I hope we all are. It’s a measure of history that it is a story you could tell now. But it’s a sorrowful shame that it happens still. You can read The Storyteller online now for free, or in Book Two of Sight Unseen, The Inverted Cup