My Secret Self

[Written as a final project for beautiful Ella St Hilaire’s Mary Magdalene course]

My secret self does not say hello. She would be too shy, though that’s a ruse; it’s only because she prefers to be watchful and silent rather than speak. She is defined by what she does not know about herself. Her actions are not clear. They are the roots of mystery. Why does she not know who she is? Jean Paul Sartre implies that in being lies nothingness, implies that at the heart of it, at the heart of her, she is free to act as she pleases, to be who she wants, at any moment. But what about the squares, the slipknots of so many quilts that her grandmother and her great grandmother made, and even the sore fingers with which her mother threaded, which surround her center and keep her from knowing how free she is, to embody, to touch spirit. The secret self is knowledge before nothingness, the gilded age before the fall—everything which hisses at transparency, and hides away—her damning habits, and rituals she can’t remember the origin of, her grandmother’s dry meatloafs, or her mother’s obsession with romance novels. She lies to herself and to others because there is no way to define truth. She has the habit of staring in the mirror, wondering who she is, and not finding any answer trying to dig under her skin and free everything which anchors her to this body, this life, these mysteries. Desecrating even the chance of touching grace, squeezing pores when there is nothing there, ruining her face. Then actions of her own making are growing the materiality of secrecy, weaving around her a shroud of shame, her contribution to what her matrilineal line wove. Yet deep within her arose a corresponding, or opposite reaction, she was condemning herself, and she wanted to die, and thoughts of suicide used to alleviate her—yet she was creating out of this desperate desire for source, for clear source, stories of her traces. Stories of the search for the mystery, the search for being. It seemed that the pain or the mystery of her secret self had this gravitational pull; people would fall in love with her. Her favorite situation was a derailing, the train of another soul careening from its tracks and into her arms, so everything in her body might be interrupted, even her own breath. But then, like inevitability, or what Jung referred to as the cause of fate, the rearing up of her shadow self, which is the only embodiment the secret self can know—makes her voracious for her lover’s downfall, to pick him apart as she picked herself apart, almost like an ancient vengeance against man. And then he would leave and she would continue to weave, making sure her shroud had a hood to cover her face.

Meanwhile, so disembodied, she cannot keep on weight, she had married the wrong person, she had children with people she did not love, and the stories piled up. But to her own face, she winces in the mirror. Then there was this man she met, who used to think he was Jesus, or had been in a past life. He was very, very tall, he liked to stare straight into the sun, and he had wads of cash in his pocket. Maybe his affiliation with the Christian savior was not for nothing, as he ended up shining a light on the bruised, and covered secret self. The more he sneered at her and told her how to be, and then licked her wounds and would fuck her and disappear, and call it her fault, and bringing her children gifts as if that made up for it, the more she cracked and was not able to mend, and the crack became seismic, and she had a vision.

A very simple clear one, of her mother reading a romance novel on the couch. And she remembered, her mother—her first obsession. Her first love. And all the messages of shame and self-hatred, the cyclical actions of attraction and desecration, and not wanting to be accountable, feeling split between thought and action, these were all symptoms of eating the marmalade that her mother had cooked down from her own sugary sap, eating that every morning on toast, when she just as well as could have had yogurt and granola.

There is no self, Sartre implied, the existentialists echoed like a chorus. ‘Self’ is an ethereal concept; made up of constructs and ideas about ourselves that secretly inform our actions and what we attract. Shame seems to build like lactic acid around those actions that are being too flexed without consciousness, repeating needlessly, holding attraction power. I had to rest and massage my muscles. I had to start leaving my face alone, and performing acts of penance, rubbing prickly pear oil on my skin to heal my pores, if ever I wanted my life to touch freedom, to touch spirit. It was funny, all the years of writing, and I was always the main character, whoever I was, the secret self, and yet I peddled my stories like they were fictions. I would not own her. She is some orphan child, she is not me. She was a slut and she betrayed people. She used to pick grass on soccer fields instead of playing, and her childhood dream was to live on an island and write stories all alone. But freedom is nothing if it doesn't liberate her, if she does not become an ‘I.’