I recently attended a reading by Native American author Sherman Alexie and not only enjoyed the three stories he read from his new collection, Blasphemy, but delighted in his hilarious self-revelations. At one point, he asked us if we'd ever shit ourselves in public. "Hold up your hands," he said, and everyone clenched in their seats. "Liars!" he scolded, and we laughed, and he proceeded to relay his sordid shitting history, sharing with us how once he'd just left a hotel only to realize shortly afterwards that he had to relieve himself--but he couldn't return to the hotel because his OCD wouldn't allow him to go back into a building he'd just left--so he wound up pooping in his pants. At some point, after sharing several such stories with the audience, he told us that if we want to write, we have to be able to stand in front of an audience and talk about this stuff. He reiterated what all of my writing teachers have instructed.
Write what scares you. Write what pains you. Write your darkness, your demons, your ghosts. Write your insides out. Write blood, sweat, tears. Write into the scars until they're festering wounds; write through the infection until the very words that tore you open turn to a salve. Write what you have been told to keep silent; write what you have been told to keep out.
I am an apt pupil. I dig. I rush toward my shame with a knife and a warm glass of milk, ready to put it to bed.
But I'm constantly wary.
You must understand that the secrets we tell reveal more than just themselves. Sherman Alexie has OCD. Sherman Alexie occasionally accidentally shits his pants. Those who think these are his most shameful secrets are fooling themselves. And those who cannot admit that they too have a disorder or have on occasion experienced a loose sphincter are even worse off.
I have told you my father molested me. Some of you have been molested too, but you do not share your secret because you believe it is a darkness you must hold inside of you, that it is yours to hide. My father's hands on my body was not my secret to keep--it was his. And I shared it.
Sharing someone else's secrets is not nearly as hard as sharing your own.
I have shared my own secrets with you, too. I have told you how I paged through loved ones' diaries, how I betrayed my brother, how I hurt my sister, how I feel about my mother. I have even told you the happy secrets, which ironically can be more difficult to share than the sad ones.
But you should know, because I have warned you in the past, and because it is a universal truth, that what I have told you, no matter how serious or shameful or vulnerable, is only a piece of what I own.
I am codependent. You know this because I have told you, but you still don't really know what it is for me. You think, perhaps, in general terms, it is low self esteem or fear or mistrust. You estimate it has something to do with denial, with control, with insecurity. Yes. But it is better conveyed in detail.
Have you ever found yourself standing over a toilet bowl full of the yellow proof of your girlfriend's frequent middle-of-the-night trips to pee, with an eyedropper in one hand and a plastic cotinine test cassette you ordered behind her back in the other hand, and held your breath as you waited for a line to appear or not appear in the spot that would tell you whether she had lied to you yet again about smoking? If when the results showed she'd been telling the truth--that she hadn't smoked or chewed nicotine gum in several days--and you felt ashamed for ordering the test, smuggling it into the bathroom, and testing your girlfriend's piss, you may understand what it is to be codependent. But you'd understand it better if you also felt simultaneously or momentarily afterwards a discordant swell of confusion, frustration, and relief. Confusion because your girlfriend was not lying to you, which meant she wasn't always a Liar, that she wasn't a demon or an angel but simply, complicatedly, human, a member of the gray space between good and evil. She wasn't this or that; she was this and that. And you found that fact frustrating and almost inconceivable because you were used to seeing people in one of two shades only. She was forcing you to acknowledge a truth that made you uncomfortable.
Confusion, frustration, relief. Your relief came from the very source of your discomfort--the truth. She was telling you the truth, so you could breathe easy and stop trying to control the world, if only for a minute.
You might know codependency even better if weeks after you tested her urine and found she was telling the truth, you tested it again after she'd told you she'd been chewing nicotine gum, only to find, of course, that it tested positive. You did the test not because you didn't believe she was using the gum, but because enough time had passed that the demon of doubt had crept in to tell you that the first test may have been a false negative. After all, the instructions called for a clean sample, not stuff that had already hit the bowl. This second test helped to restore your flailing faith in the first test, the one that you'd allowed to be your higher power that day--the test that you decided knew reality better than you did.
Months later, after your breakup, you stumble across the leftover tests in your closet and feel compelled to tell her what you did. She forgives you--easily--and though you're glad, you worry because you have something else you have to share with her that makes you somehow even more ashamed. The night before you shared with her about the tests, you invited her over for the first time in months, and you were nervous and excited, worried about your recovery but hopeful too, and while you were hugging, your hand brushed her front pocket, felt a hard rectangle beneath the denim.
It only took the tactile suggestion of a lighter for you to betray her. Your mouth dried to a thick wool, your heart stuttered. But you couldn't let her know. You smiled. You raised one eyebrow intentionally, like a skirt sliding up a thigh, dressed your voice in something a little more comfortable, and whispered a scantily-clad question of an accusation. "Are you packing?"
She laughed.
You held your breath.
"My car keys," she responded, her eyes glowing fiercely with her love, everything about her soft and shining, oblivious to your puppetry.
You tell her twenty-four hours later, and it's almost impossible to type the words because to you this isn't a trifling misstep; it's evidence of how easily you can slide back into the past, how readily you will let your demon press your buttons so you can manipulate the people you love to assuage your fears. To you, this is proof of how broken you are, and you tell her she deserves better, because you love her and she does deserve better, not because you want to manipulate her but because you're terrified she will leave your crazy ass and you think it might be better if she goes now rather than confesses to you months down the road that you are too much to handle.
So.
If you know how to work strings...
If you have good intentions but fall prey to dark deeds...
If letting someone love you feels like a pinwheeling tumble over the world's tallest waterfall...
You know that sharing about how you accidentally shit your pants is just a drop in the bucket.
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