Lie No. 2 | 08.26.18

Turns out, secrets grow; even if you stick them in the dark + don’t feed them. What no one really acknowledges is it stops being someone else’s secret the second you touch it.
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The day this secret became mine, the earth shook; but only under the dock I sat atop, alone at the time. I remember the waves smacking under me more violently than the neighboring docks, but no one on the beach seemed to notice. So who was I to acknowledge it? One of my biggest fears is looking stupid (I know, I know); to a fault, I need facts before I’m comfortable reacting. So, I went back to my room, screamed into my pillow + got ready for NYE dinner like nothing happened.
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I got the first-person confirmation I needed 8 days after the quake + started my dance on the fault line. I knew the music would stop + the truth would start playing, I just didn’t know when; hell, I was now the dj. I almost romanticize that moment as one with a profound effect on who I’d become: a staunch believer that both all things are possible + nothing is safe. So, I got to work to minimize future destruction; like a prepper, but for man-made, invisible disasters.
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Thank god I was self aware enough at 24 to know that line wouldn’t play well at cocktail parties + late-nights, so I didn’t talk about it save for very few people, not enough to even form a trust circle—certainly not with my therapist again. Only now am I starting to see how dangerous that decision was, for reasons both obvious + not.
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I made it my responsibility to take this story’s painfully predictable ending + give it the ✨rewrite of a lifetime✨. I wasn’t naïve enough to think I could give it a happy ending; but I honestly thought I could minimize the pain for the other characters. J.K. effing Rowling over here. My disappointment—in them, not me—crushed me when that didn’t happen. Then I got mad. I’d spent the last 5 years busting my ass researching + testing tools to make everyone else’s crashes softer than my own; why wouldn’t they trust my script, the one I wanted so desperately that day in therapy?
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Do you take leaps of faith even when you know the landing will be messy?