Secrets and Lies

I finished becoming someone else before I finished writing about who I was. That's the problem.

There is a project sitting unfinished on my hard drive called Secrets and Lies — a collection of diary-style entries following an unreliable narrator through years of self-destruction, unstable relationships, loneliness, and the particular kind of comfort that only leaves new bruises.

I started it because I needed somewhere to put things. Years after therapy and a lot of uncomfortable honesty with myself, I finally found language for some of what I had been living through. Not answers exactly, but context, a brain and a life that had learned patterns I didn't understand at the time.

That's when I decided to write.

The narrator is an unreliable one. She moves through years of mistaking pain for affection and confusion for connection. One entry follows her sitting through a movie, enduring violence, and mistaking access for care. Afterward, she writes it down in the flat, detached language people sometimes use when they don't believe they have words to match what happened to them.

That entry was a hard write. What surprised me more was discovering it was even harder to revisit.

I thought my problem was courage. Wondering if I needed more editing, more distance, more willingness to be seen. I thought that if people rejected the work, they were rejecting me, and I wasn't ready for that.

But that wasn't it.

The story never came together because I stopped recognizing the person telling it.

The narrator in those pages is quiet. She apologizes for existing. She searches for reasons people might hurt her and assumes she is part of the problem. She survives by choosing heartbreak after heartbreak, and she dares to define that as love.

I don't feel a connection to her anymore.

Not because I think she was weak. Simply because I spent years becoming someone else. I was reborn.

Now, when I read those drafts, I don't feel sadness. I feel anger. I feel protective. I want to interrupt the pages and tell her to leave. To stop shrinking herself down. To stop believing that wanting care is the same as accepting harm.

And that's the friction.

To finish this story, I would have to return to that voice long enough to write her honestly. I would have to hold her perspective without losing mine. I would have to stay in that headspace without letting it follow me out of the writing and back into the rest of my life.

I'm not sure I know how to do that yet.

So it sits.

Not because it isn't good enough. Not because I'm afraid to publish it. Because I haven't figured out how to hold compassion for the person who lived it without becoming her again.