Are Secrets Making You Sick?

Time to Clean Out the Basement

“Hurry,” you yell. “Come and help me bar this door.” You’re using your body against it now, holding it closed with all your might, but your strength is waning. You need a better barricade if you want to keep everything from escaping.

I’m sure most of us have that one box hidden down in the basement, sealed up with duct tape. Inside, you might have covered the important content with old clothes or meaningless papers to detract from the one nugget at the bottom, just in case anyone were to go searching. You don’t think anyone will, though, because you’ve made the box as unappealing as possible. Mundane. Just like any other box sitting down there for years and years collecting dust.

Since I’ve been writing about family stories, several people have started dragging up those boxes and opening them right in front of me. They look at me with a question: “What do you think I’m supposed to do with this?”

I’m no therapist, but I’ll listen. I have discovered that holding a secret for a long time tends to make you sick. And meds don’t always work for that kind of sickness.

I used to keep all my old diaries in a plastic bin out in the garage. I was a little too open with my writing in my youth, I think. And then in later years, I started worrying that someone might find those notebooks from way back. Containing things I had become an expert at hiding.

Weirdly, every single time I put on make-up in the morning, I think of a Shakespearean allusion. You probably know the reference where Hamlet yells at Ophelia, “God hath given you one face, and you make yourself another one.” Layers of meaning exist here. It’s not simply that Ophelia paints her face to please others. It’s also about being two-faced or deceptive in some way. It’s about hiding behind a false front.  

After I fell off my bike years ago and suffered a concussion and loss of memory, I came upon that old plastic bin with all those secrets. The thought of anyone, including my family, finding them if I had passed away haunted me. The drive to avoid exposure pushed me into sending all the paper through a shredder.

Years of notebooks now unreadable in the garbage.

Not sure that’s the healthiest advice to give to people who open one of their notebooks in front of me. I have seen Anxiety (capital letter purposeful) take residence in people’s lives due to this very reason.  Keeping things tamped down for so long takes too much energy. You work your body into a frenzy always trying to bury the past. Shredding all of my secrets did not kill them, of course. They still existed in my head.

Now, I give the advice that maybe you should tell your story.

You can’t push someone, though. You have to be ready to remove the cloak. It’s scary, yes, but once you lay it out there, you gain the upper hand. You get some rest from all that fighting and concealing. And you somehow get to watch Anxiety lose some muscle tone. She wilts and slinks off. And as I said in another piece I wrote, once she expires, you can bury her among the other ghosts of your past.

Some people tell me their stories through tears and angst, to be sure. But also, with a new-found strength. Not everyone wants to write these stories for the world to see but telling them once is a first step. And some have given me permission to share them, so I will do that with care when I find the right moments (using a bit of poetic license—name-changing and such).

Henry Wadsworth Longfellow said, “Let the dead Past bury its dead.”

[My yet unpublished creative nonfiction book has an element of mystery to it, for secrets, indeed, crawl up from the basement and show their ugly faces. I reluctantly unlocked the padlocks on the basement door and fought that Anxiety through storytelling. I’d love to share my book with you someday. I plan to.]