THE SECRET LIFE
Who knows what evil lurks in the hearts of men?
-from The Shadow (1930-54)
A woman in the doctor’s waiting room natters on about the weather,
oblivious to the fact that no one’s really listening. Maybe she’s a
chatterbox. Or maybe she’s terminally ill.
A man stands in line at the bank, frowning to himself. Maybe he’s
overdrawn. Or maybe when he gets home he’ll tell his wife he no
longer loves her.
A child on the swing in the playground wears long sleeves, though
it’s the height of summer. Maybe her mother is overprotective. Or
maybe her mother beats her black-and-blue.
The husband in bed turns to face you. He may be thinking only of
you. Or he may be thinking only of your closest friend.
The man on the treadmill next to yours at the gym runs as fast as he
can, turning his iPod’s volume up as high as it will go. Maybe he
can’t lose those last five pounds. Or maybe he can’t get rid of the
image of that woman he met at the bar, and can’t drown out her
screams.
And you: Maybe you know yourself. Or maybe you don’t.
We all have secrets; we live and breathe them every day. We may not
know what one another’s secrets are, but we know they’re there.
They’re always there, invisible presences in everyone’s lives, the
subtext beneath the text, the almost uttered but then swallowed
sentence, the cryptic, fleeting expression on someone’s face.
Humankind’s basic needs are food, water, and shelter, but secrets
aren’t too far down the list of essentials. They provide a safe
haven that allows us the freedom to explore who we are, to establish
an identity that is uniquely our own. But even the deepest secrets
can also be shared; they are the currency of close relationships,
the coin of exclusivity, sometimes the key to love itself.
Under some circumstances, however, secrets can also be profound
sources of shame, guilt, anxiety, despair. While we’re always
surprised when we learn about the misbehavior or strange habits and
predilections of friends or public figures, in another way we aren’t
surprised at all. We’ve grown to expect that such behavior will crop
up occasionally, that unusual personality traits will be routinely
revealed. And we expect it not only because we’ve seen it in other
friends or public figures (and we certainly have), but because we
have been known to behave in this manner sometimes, too, and because
we also possess well-concealed traits and habits and interests that
would be considered strange by other people.
Secrets can cause people to behave in ways that seem entirely out of
character-to go to any desperate length to conceal what simply must
be hidden, at all costs. They can require so much vigilance and
attentiveness and sheer time that they begin to dominate an entire
life, in effect becoming that person’s life. Everything that is
unrelated to the secret becomes secondary and irrelevant and is cast
off. A kind of fear-sometimes, nearly a paranoia-sets in at the
mere idea of the secret being unearthed. What if someone finds out I
stole that money? What if my employer reads my blog and sees that
I’m not just an ordinary nanny, but that I also have an active sex
life and have taken Xstasy? What if my best friend finds out I hate
her husband? What if my most private self is revealed? Then
everything will be lost. The possibility of discovery is played out
again and again like a sickening loop of film.
Many secret lives remain sub-rosa for surprisingly long periods of
time. Relationships are kept hidden through sheer ingenuity, and
dark acts stay in perpetual darkness. The serial killer learns to
live with secrecy as his constant companion; so does the illicit
lover, or the tax cheat, or the thief. The balance of power between
secret and secret-keeper is constantly being negotiated. If we can
control our own secrets, making sure they occupy the place we want
them to, then our lives can seem manageable. But when our secrets
start to control us-and far too often they do-then a normal life
clicks over into something else: a secret life.
When that happens, everything changes. Suddenly we find ourselves
forced to give up any remaining vestiges of openness and casualness
and instead submit full-time to the exacting rules that the secret
life inevitably demands.
And the reason we are forced to submit in this way is that the
secrets we keep to ourselves are only half the story. The other half
is composed of the secrets we keep from ourselves. These are the
ones that have been forced underground over time, in some instances
since early childhood. They are the ones that we simply don’t want
to know about, so embarrassed or enraged would we feel if we were
forced to confront them head-on. Glimmers of those feelings
occasionally surface without our understanding why; we may overreact
to seemingly trivial events, or have a strong response to a
particular person, or be disturbed by a dream we’ve dreamed without
really knowing why. In these moments, we’ve somehow entered the
cordoned-off territory of the secret from the self, and while we may
not understand this has happened, we know enough to tighten up
security even further.
But without access to these inner secrets, we can’t really know
ourselves at all. Instead, we’re forced to spend our lives in a
state of continual vagueness, ignorant of the reasons behind our own
actions and perceptions.
In the following chapters I take the basic concept of secrecy-which
is intrinsic to everyone, though sometimes subtly so-and magnify it
so it can be viewed as the powerful, dramatic, life-shaping force it
is. Some of the stories trace the ways that people’s lives have been
destroyed because of the secrets they keep. Other stories tell of
lives that have flourished because of the layers of complexity and
richness that secrecy provides them. At times, secret-keeping proves
to be a question of choice, or even luxury; at other times, it has
life-or-death consequences.
A few of the secret-keepers here are composites of people I have
seen in my practice as a psychoanalyst. Their circumstances might
seem extraordinary at times, but they arise out of the ordinary
complications of daily life. I’ve chosen them precisely because they
are representative. You might even recognize aspects of yourself.
Other stories in this book come right from history: a world-famous
hero who, at the height of his fame, secretly fathered many children
with several women; a composer of international renown whose sexual
predilections might have forced him to commit suicide; a beloved
military figure who could find sexual pleasure only at the receiving
end of a whip. If these descriptions sound far removed from your own
life, that’s deliberate on my part; some of these lives have been
chosen for their sweeping, dramatic scale, which makes it easier to
see not just the ways in which specific secret-keepers operate, but
the ways in which all secret-keepers do. And that includes every one
of us.
“Know thyself,” urged Socrates, while a more modern maxim insists,
“Ignorance is bliss.” The two proverbs, often quoted, deliver
opposing messages. Some people live by one, some by the other. But
most people, at different times in their lives and in various ways,
live by both. They try to remain open and honest as much as
possible, keeping some details fuzzy and vague and hidden from
certain people, while concealing other details from everyone,
including themselves.
Secrets: Can’t live with them, can’t live without them. They are
here with us at all times, swirling around us, causing problems,
generating excitement, forcing us to be watchful. “I know something
you don’t know,” goes the singsong of children. This is true for all
of us. We all know things that other people don’t, things we’d love
to blurt out but that we simply can’t. Secrets are like a long
inhaled breath that can’t wait to be exhaled, and perhaps never
will. They are maddening, thrilling, dangerous. Secrets routinely
meet in the air and then disperse, unspoken. And every day,
secret-keepers keep on doing what they do: living one life, and then
living another.
Chapter Two
THE SECRET LIFE OF THE MIND
I’m Chevy Chase, and you’re not.
-from Saturday Night Live (c. 1975)
It was loneliness that drew her to the desktop computer at first,
and later on it was excitement. Adrian always made sure to finish
her homework first, and then she kissed her mother good night (her
father was usually traveling) and went upstairs to her bedroom,
where she would sit in front of the pale blue glowing monitor,
living an IM life that was so much more compelling and fulfilling
than the one she really lived.
Her early years had been easy and pleasurable, surrounded by
friends. But starting in sixth grade, the line between cool and
uncool began to thicken, and Adrian found herself falling on the
wrong side of the divide. She didn’t mind. She could always hang out
with the other girls in this group and pretend that none of them
cared about being uncool. But for the alpha girls, coolness evolved
into cruelty. No matter how Adrian dressed, or what she said or did,
the alpha girls beat her down with their nasty words, mocking her
clumsy attempts to fit in. They’d taken a page right out of the
movie Mean Girls, and though Adrian tried to believe, as she wrote
in her diary, that they were just using her as a scapegoat and that
she shouldn’t take it personally, she took the mean girls’ words to
heart. She was ugly, she wrote in that diary, and fat, and stupid,
and a complete loser. She might as well die right now. Even Stephen
King’s Carrie had it better than she did. So Adrian, a girl with
deep-set, hungry eyes and an awkward way of carrying herself as she
navigated the treacherous corridors of school, retreated into
herself.
The Internet helped her do that, providing an alternate corridor
that she could walk down easily, and where no one would hiss cruel
names at her, or casually stick out a foot so that she would stumble
and fall. Adrian began IMing every night, and while in her daily
life she was an outcast, here she was popular. Different anonymous
people chatted with her, both male and female, and she found herself
writing responses in the shorthand that such interactions required.
The rhythms of the chats were friendly and funny and sometimes
flirtatious. She took the screen name Exotica, a name that had just
popped into her head out of nowhere, which was funny to her, because
Adrian, at fifteen, with her slightly lumpy nose and scattering of
acne and clumsy demeanor, was the furthest thing in the world from
exotic. But no one online had to know that.
One night she began talking with a guy who called himself chai83. He
lived in the suburbs of New Jersey, only an hour and a half from her
own Long Island suburb. “Hey, Exotica,” he wrote. “How u doin?” To
which Adrian replied, “Exotica is bored 2nite. Tell me something
interesting.” The tone of her words was playful and teasing; she’d
never spoken like this to anyone before. But as “Exotica” chatted on
through the evening and into the night, long after her mother had
gone to bed, she started to open up to chai83. She kept a balance
between her actual, Adrian self and her new, Exotica persona, mixing
true details (chestnut hair, dark brown eyes) with made-up ones (age
eighteen, worked as a bartender at a trendy club in Manhattan).
Though her own details were a stew of the real and the false, she
never questioned whether chai83’s own story was entirely true. He
said that he was twenty-two, with black wavy hair and dark blue
eyes, and that he was an aspiring actor who made his living as a
waiter. Back and forth, they traded anecdotes and aspirations,
mostly using suggestive language. This went on and on for a matter
of weeks. Adrian seemed less troubled by the mean girls at school,
and their catty comments simply floated past her. She was moving
further away from school itself. She stopped listening in class, and
began failing tests. It got to the point where Adrian skipped doing
her homework altogether and just went straight to the computer,
where chai83 was inevitably waiting. For an actor who had a day job
and was often going off on auditions, he was online a surprising
amount of time.
Then one night, chai83 said he wanted to “take my friendship with u
to a new level.” He asked Exotica to meet him in the parking lot of
the mall in his hometown. Tentatively, she agreed. “How will I know
u, Exotica?” he asked. “I will be the exotic one,” she told him.
Three days later, after Adrian’s body had been found in a swamp in
central New Jersey, her desperate mother wept to the policemen who
came to her home that her daughter was a studious girl who would
never go anywhere unsafe or do anything stupid. And when the
sergeant asked if Adrian had kept secrets from her, her mother shook
her head no with conviction.
To have secrets is to be human. To find in a private world a
personal identity is an essential part of what it means to be a
member of our species. The ability to have a secret is the thing
that gives birth to our sense of ourselves in early childhood, and
the secrets we keep and share are what shape our relationships for
the rest of our lives. Here, then, is a crash course in
developmental psychology, as it relates to the complex and very
human art of secrecy.
Once, none of us had any secrets. Our life in the climate-controlled
aquarium of the womb was all mom, all the time. We were one with
this woman whom we hadn’t even met. When she ate Szechuan chicken,
we did, too; when we had hiccups, she felt every tremor. Out of the
womb, we technically had a separate existence from our mothers. But
of course the infant is no less dependent than it was before being
born; in some respects, it’s even more dependent. The comfort and
sustenance that came effortlessly while floating in the womb now
require a little individual effort: a suckle, a thumb in the mouth,
an earsplitting, colicky cry.
Through these tiny efforts, the child begins to distinguish itself
as a separate entity in the world. Months pass. The independence
grows. The child finds the lesson of peekaboo a source of endless
fascination: A person can disappear and reappear! How cool is that?
Soon the child makes the intellectual leap: Whoa, people don’t
disappear-they just go out of sight. Mom is gone now, but she’ll be
right back-mom, who used to be “me.”
The child holds on to furniture and cruises around the great forest
of the living room. He or she lets go and actually takes a solo
walk. Babbling turns into syllables that are actually understood by
the adults in the room. At around fifteen to eighteen months, the
child recognizes itself in mirrors or photos. By two, the child
learns that he or she is in fact a he or she. And it is at this
moment that the child, after months and months of saying nothing but
yes-yes to the breast, yes to a spoonful of Beech-Nut apricots, yes
to mom and mobility and speech-learns to say no.
No is a word that comes with tremendous power. Any parent who has
ever experienced a child going through the “terrible twos” will know
just how intoxicating that power can be, for in one transformative
moment, children begin to understand that they can have some control
over the outside world.
(Continues…)
Excerpted from Anatomy of a Secret Life
by Gail Saltz
Copyright © 2006 by Gail Saltz, M.D..
Excerpted by permission.
All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.
Excerpts are provided by Dial-A-Book Inc. solely for the personal use of visitors to this web site.
Morgan Road Books
Copyright © 2006
Gail Saltz, M.D.
All right reserved.
ISBN: 0-7679-2274-3
