The Conversations We're Not Having

I'll start.

TW: Brief mention of miscarriage

There’s something so powerful to me about giving words and a voice to our many universal experiences. The ones you don’t find on a curated Instagram feed. The ones we’re taught to keep quiet.

So many of our struggles and stories have common elements, common warning signs, common scripts even, that they follow as things unfold. And yet, at least culturally in the States, we’re conditioned to pretend them away in favor of supposed decorum.

Don’t be messy. Don’t be indulgent. Don’t be dramatic. Don’t be weak.

Instead of communal exchanges and honest, shared learning, we keep “private” matters private. Burying ugly secrets beneath fenced-in backyards, where the neighbors won’t be bothered by the rawness of our overturned earth.

But who does that help, really?

The secrecy, I’d argue, isn’t helping us—now forced to not only to live with the imperfectness of it all, but to conceal it. As if life is something to be ashamed of.

And it’s not helping our neighbors—who might’ve been able to take some meaningful something from our story, had we only shared it. Something that could spare them untold pain. Pain only amplified by isolation.

Our avoidance isolates us and each other in countless ways and in countless contexts:

A best man, slapping the groom’s shoulder as he shakes his head, saying, “Welcome to the club.” As if he couldn’t have offered his friend a peek behind the curtain until now.

A should-be mother in mourning, who feels so alone in knowing how a body can betray a heart, until her friends whisper talley their own miscarriage(s). Plural. But why hadn’t they told her until now? She might’ve been better prepared. Aware that this too, is part of a life story.

Infidelity. Grief. Loss. Failure. Heartbreak. Abuse.

Are we choosing to keep quiet or conditioned to do so?

Who exactly are we protecting? And who are we pretending for?

Personally, I never agreed to keep the secret. But when I share my truths—be it here or in my books—it’s not meant to be mess on public display. It’s offering and seeking out shared humanity. Vulnerability extended in hopes that it begets vulnerability in return. Lessons learned out loud, so we don’t keep following each other blindly into the same goddamn minefields.

I am a person who wants to have those conversations. The ones we’re not supposed to be having. And I want to start with one that has shaped the last couple years of my personal and professional/creative life in some really incredible (and unexpected) ways.

Let’s meet back here soon for a conversation on Rejection.