June 29, 2021 • 40 mins
In this bonus episode, Dani sits down for a conversation with Kelly Corrigan for her podcast, Kelly Corrigan Wonders.
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Speaker 1 (00:07):
High Family Secrets. Family. It's Danny here with the first
bonus episode we're dropping as we get busy producing brand
new episodes for the next season. Today, I'm sharing a
conversation between myself and the utterly wonderful Kelly Corrigan, whose podcast,
Kelly Corrigan Wonders is a treasure trove of special deep
(00:27):
dives with guests such as Austin Channing Brown, Margaret Atwood,
George Saunders, Gia Tolentino, Anna Quinlin, Kate Bohler, and oh
my got so many more amazing thinkers. I was honored
when Kelly asked me to unpack a platitude that I
suspect is near and dear to Family Secrets listeners. What
we don't know can't hurt us, agree or disagree. I
(00:52):
hope you'll listen and enjoy, and remember, we're also revamping
listener stories, which are now going to be called Danny's Listening,
in which we'll listen to a story someone is called
in and I'll respond. So, if you want to share
your family's secret story, just call one eight Secret zero.
That's one eight Secret and the number zero. Hi. I'm
(01:29):
Kelly Corrigan, and today I'm wondering about the allure of
ignorance and it's promise of bliss, and in what ways
what we don't know might indeed be hurting us and
for that matter, hurting others. So I was reading this
funny piece on Medium, my production partner for this series,
about how much everybody thinks they know and how very
(01:53):
little it turns out we actually do know, for instance, toilets,
like how many people really know how a toilet works?
How many people even want to know how a toilet works?
So I've been curious about the weight of knowledge for years,
and I'm more sensitive than ever to the burden of
knowing what's in your kids texts, what's in the one
(02:15):
thousand page piece of legislation you're so sure you support?
What's in our food, our air, our d n A,
who makes our laptop? What do our in laws really
think of us? How much is the guy sitting next
to us actually getting paid with me for this deep dive?
Is Danny Shapiro. You may have read one of her
(02:35):
novels or memoirs. I think she has like nine books
to her name, and you may well be one of
the millions who are plugging into her podcast family secrets
high Kelly. Before we get into this conversation, we're going
to do a quick speed round so everybody can get
a quick sense of you. Danny Shapiro, what book have
(02:56):
you read more than once? Many? Actually, but I'm going
to shooes Wallace Stegner's Crossing to Safety, which I try
to reread every couple of years, sort of a literary
soul palate cleansera. Do you have a go to mantra
for hard times? I do. It comes from my friend,
the Buddhist teacher Sylvia Borstein, who speaks to herself as
(03:19):
a beloved person, says to herself, may I meet this
moment fully? May I meet it as a friend? Other
than what you don't know won't hurt you? What platitude
makes you crazy? Can I pick two? Everything happens for
a reason and God doesn't give us more than we
can handle. They're essentially the same platitude. They mean it
(03:42):
to be comforting, but when you are the person on
the receiving end of that, you have been given more
than you can handle, and there is absolutely no sense
that you have that there is a reason for it,
And so there is just this feeling of something being
painted over. Yes, And you're an odd enough for the moment, right,
So you have a particularly interesting relationship to knowing more
(04:06):
as you recently uncovered something utterly fundamental about your identity.
So about four years ago, my husband and I sent
away for a DNA test, just the over the counter
recreational DNA testing, really because he wanted to, and I
just went along with it, not for any reason, not
(04:28):
out of any curiosity. I thought I knew everything about
where I came from, who my parents were, who my
ancestors were, what my ethnicity was. This test was so
uninteresting to me that I forgot that I had even
spit into the plastic file. It just wasn't a big deal.
When the results came back, it was pretty quickly revealed
(04:52):
to me that the dad who raised me, who I adored,
and who I lost in a car at in it
when I was twenty three, and my relationship with whom
really defined so much of my childhood, teenage years, adult life,
my literary life. I found out that he had not
(05:14):
been my biological father, which was something that I had
never consciously entertained, never ever occurred to me, And in
terms of what we don't know, panther won't hurt us.
That led me into this deep dive into these twin mysteries.
(05:37):
And the first mystery was, well, if my father wasn't
my biological father, who is? And the other was what
did my parents know? And was this something that was
actively kept as a secret from me all my life?
Was this something that my parents and maybe even other
people too, knew about me that I didn't know about myself.
(06:01):
So when you first put it together, did you think
I really wish I didn't know this. I would much
rather have the story stay stable, that this man that
I love so much, that's such a part of my
identity that I've been grieving for twenty or thirty years.
I wish I never spit in the vial. Not for
(06:21):
a single second did I feel that way. That's so
interesting to me. I was really crazy about my dad too.
I feel like I'd throw the information across the room
and run away and say like, oh, I don't believe you.
It's it's a mistake. I did go through those steps.
When the first signs were there, the breakdown of my
ethnicity made no sense. I found ways to justify that
(06:44):
my ethnicity should have been that I was nearly a
hundred percent Eastern European Oshkenazi. I was raised in a
Jewish home. Both of my parents were Eastern European Oshgnazi Jews,
and my ethnicity came back that I was half Swedish, Irish,
French German, and I just I was like, no, no, no, no,
it must simply be wrong, or maybe all Jews are
(07:08):
mongrels in some way, and maybe it's possible to be.
As I went on with each step becoming clearer and
clearer that this really was the case, I was definitely
like a little kid sticking my fingers in my ears,
going la la la, la, la la la until it
(07:28):
was irrefutable. How many minutes, hours, days, weeks, months until
you called your mother or had shearity passed? Oh, she
had passed? There was no one to call. I think
one of the things that happened really pretty quickly, and
I don't want to underplay how painful it was. It
was painful and shocking, but I also didn't wish I
(07:52):
didn't know it because it made a kind of immediate, crazy,
deep profound sense. I mean, I remember within twenty four
hours just feeling like, uh so that was what was
going on. That's why everyone who ever met me told
(08:17):
me that I didn't look Jewish. That's why people constantly
commented on that I didn't look like my family, because
I didn't. I just thought it was some genetic quirk.
But it was staring me in the face in the
mirror in a physical resemblance sense, but in a much
deeper way, Kelly, it was something didn't add up. I always,
(08:41):
as a child felt other different, like I sort of
had my nose pressed to the glass. Something about me
didn't make sense to me. I didn't feel like I
belonged in this large, extended family who I loved and
was very proud to be part of. But I didn't
feel like I belonged. And it was such a strange feeling.
(09:04):
I mean, when you're a child and you have those feelings,
you have to supply a narrative. And the narrative that
I supplied was there must be something wrong with me
that I'm feeling this way. And so in the wake
of this discovery, I really felt like a huge and
(09:26):
massive mystery, a kind of subtle disconnect that I had
carried with me all my life, with all of my
exploration as a writer, as someone who publicly contemplates for
a living and for my art. I was like missing
the bulls eye. I kept on throwing arrows, but I
(09:49):
knew that I was missing my mark. I knew it,
but I didn't know what that meant. It just felt
like something must just be wrong with me, that it
doesn't all add up. So you have done thirty some
episodes of this podcast called Family Secrets, and Family Secrets
is exactly what it sounds like. It's somebody coming on
and talking to you about a family secret. Is it
(10:11):
your conclusion that in almost all those cases, they too
have like a niggling sense that something screwy, that something's
not adding up. Is that a feature of many stories
where you come to know something absolutely? It is in
almost all of the story. Is where a secret has
been withheld in that way where it has to do
(10:34):
with identity or with a closely held family secret about
a tragedy, a loss, there is a sense on the
part of the person from whom it's been withheld that
something hasn't felt right as you did. Do people typically
pin that on themselves. Is it sort of eating away
(10:55):
at people's self esteem that they're feeling this sense of misalignment,
certainly in the case of misattributed parentage, but when it
comes to someone's parents not having been their biological parent
and them never having known that, or cases where someone
(11:16):
is adopted and has never been told, there is absolutely
across the board almost the same language that's used. Of
It felt like something didn't make sense to me about me.
I didn't add up. It's so sad. I had cancer
in my thirties and we went to see the doctors.
And then after we got organized about what I was
(11:38):
going to do and when chemo would start and all that,
then I said, what do we do with these kids?
We have a two year old and a one year old,
And they said until kids are eight, they sort of
believe that everything is about them. And so the doctor
was saying to you, your kids should just know this.
It should not be something that's kept from them. And
(11:59):
thank goodness of the wisdom of that doctor, because even
to this day, in medical situations, information that's withheld. Everybody's
sparing each other, you know what I mean, Yeah, except
there they think they are. It's in the name of protection,
it's in the name of love. And one of the
things that I learned in my story when I really
(12:21):
started researching it is that at the time that my
parents were experiencing infertility, my father was unable to get
my mother pregnant basically, and they ultimately used a sperm donor.
And this was in the nineteen sixties. And every piece
(12:42):
of research that I did, every book that I read,
every magazine article that I read, basically contained also the
same language from the medical community, which was the child
must never know. Go home and never tell anyone. Don't
tell others, siblings, don't tell your parents, don't tell your
(13:03):
sisters or brothers, don't tell your friends. It will be
as if it never happened, because what we don't know
won't hurt us. It's in the literature because their parents
were told the child must never know, it actually became,
in most cases so buried inside the psyches of the
parents that it became like almost dissolved, almost like it
(13:31):
didn't exist at all. Except secrets don't work that way.
Secrets never go away. Secrets are like toxic waste. They
never go away, and when they're not dealt with head on,
they leach into everything surrounding them, so that the air
that I was breathing when I was growing up was
(13:53):
confused air. It was two parents who knew what they
had done, but had decided that it had never happened,
and so when they looked at me, they saw their
own secret that they had buried. One thing that's interesting
about the thing that your parents kept from you and
(14:15):
from all your guests on family secrets is that not
only did they keep it, but they are keeping it
like it's a daily thing. And that I think is
one of the most unsettling things about what you don't
know and and why Ultimately it's such a crusher when
your ignorance is removed. There's all sorts of things that
(14:37):
are painful and heavy to know and to live with,
and that are being kept from us, that are being
smoothed over by various institutions and organizations that we have
to deal with in American society, for instance, how the
United States operated in Vietnam, or what is in Donald
Trump's tax code, what goes into a piece of wonderbread,
(14:59):
what's in your kids nexts. But nonetheless, there's zero progress,
as is true for a human being, right there's zero
personal progress, and there's also zero societal progress if we're
living with manipulated information absolutely. The tagline for family secrets
is the secrets that are kept from us, the secrets
(15:19):
we keep from others, and the secrets we keep from ourselves.
And I actually find the secrets that we keep from
ourselves perhaps the most poignant of those kinds of secrets.
I don't believe that my parents stayed awake at night
(15:40):
in the dark whispering to each other in their bed
about how they were keeping this secret from their child.
I don't believe that they ever spoke of it again.
And so it also leached into their marriage, which was
a very contentious and unhappy marriage. My mother was contemptuous
of my father. My father there was depressed, and you know,
(16:02):
I spent my life as a writer trying to dig
into why my parents were the way they were, and
all of the narratives that I supplied were true, they
just weren't the whole truth. And so on family secrets.
At the end of every interview, I always asked my guest,
do you wish you didn't know? Every single time, I
have yet to have a single guest say, yeah, I
wish I hadn't known. I feel like this knowledge that
(16:26):
I have and that I have now had for the
last four years is like a superpower. I remember calling
a therapist that I had seen for years, because when
you make a discovery like this, you can't go to
somebody new. And when I called her, she said, you know,
there was always a subtle disconnect. And I was like,
(16:50):
what do you mean? And she said, the woman sitting
across from me, like, what you were narrating about your
life and your fildhood and what your affect was, and
your presentation and your energy they didn't mesh. And I
(17:11):
mean to take that a step further. My mother in law,
who was this really wise, wonderful woman who had known
my mother, and my mother was quite difficult. She said
to me, sweetheart, I don't know how you survived your childhood.
You must have a hell of a constitution. And I
(17:32):
looked at her, and I remember thinking, she's right, I do.
I did not come from two people who had a
hell of a constitution, either one of them in any way,
both in terms of nature and in terms of nurture.
And yet I did have something within me that I
(17:53):
didn't understand, and I couldn't have articulated that to you.
At the time. All I knew was this doesn't add up.
When Danny and I talked, I had just come back
from Montgomery, Alabama, where I spent two days with civil
rights attorney Brian Stevenson. He's the just Mercy guy talking
about how knowing more about our nation's history, like the
(18:17):
full story, not the heroes only highlight reel, might be
the only way forward for America and our racial reckoning.
I just spent a whole bunch of time with Brian
Stevenson for this PBS show that I'm doing, and we
talked a lot about truth and reconciliation in the United
States around race relations, going from slavery to Jim Crow,
(18:40):
to lynching to police brutality, these four major movements in
American history. And he said, I think everybody owes it
to themselves and to their nation to look at your
family history under the lens of racism and slavery. Now
look at the college you went to, like how did
that college benefit from it? Now look at where you bank,
(19:02):
how does that bank operate? Now look at your homeowners association,
and keep looking at every circle you're in for a
more truthful, complete accounting of that organization's history. It is
more comfortable in many ways to not know everything about
(19:23):
our country, everything about our spouse, everything about our town,
everything about our children. My son is actually my son
is twenty one, but he has left his journal literally open,
sitting on a table in our house, and I've never
looked at I think I would have if I was
worried about him. I never have need to do that.
I just want to admit I could never walk past
(19:45):
an open journal. If I saw it, I would be like,
this is a sign I'm supposed to look at it.
Maybe she wants me to look. You know, I have
all kinds of like mantal gymnastics that I'll do around
things to justify what I know would be infuriating if
someone were to do it to me. Well, my mother
my journal. So I think that that just cured me
in my desire to be nothing like her. There are
certain just clear sort of lines in the sand of
(20:06):
like I won't cross that. My mom read my journal
and I got grounded for an entire month of ninth
grade because I had written down in my journal curse words,
and she said that is so filthy. I can't believe
how long that list was. And you're grounded for a month.
I'm glad she didn't read my journalist. Hey, I was like,
that's pretty innocent, right. So when I was listening to
(20:29):
the researcher talk about nature versus nurture, you think about,
as a parent, how desperately you want my parental moves,
at least my best ones, to count to land to
have the impact that I so desire. Yeah, exactly. I
mean when I was on the road, I had a
lot of people in my audiences who were parents, parents
(20:52):
of biological kids, parents of adopted kids, of donor conceived kids,
and I started getting a lot of push back and
kind of angry threatened comments during the Q and A
s and like, basically, what are you saying? Are you
saying that nature trump's nurture? What are you saying to us?
(21:13):
And of course that's not remotely what I was saying,
But I thought, that's so interesting. Why are people feeling
this way? And what I came to understand is that
we so desperately want nurture to be all that matters
because we believe that we can control it. Well, you know,
it's so interesting. I found that the new information that
(21:36):
science is sort of generally rallying around this idea that
what we've considered to be personality traits are driven by
our genetic code. I found that enormously freeing. A big
promise of knowing more is that you will be perhaps uncomfortable,
and you will perhaps be at sea a little bit.
But ultimately there are certain freedoms that come with the
(21:59):
full story. And a freedom for me was, Oh, maybe
you shouldn't be so insistent that your kid makes some change,
because maybe that's just written into them. That's like saying,
like change your eye color, grow another inch, you know,
be a faster runner. It's pushing them to change in
(22:21):
ways that maybe they're not capable of changing. And so
to me, just knowing that additional piece of information cause
me to accept my kids a little bit more just
as they are, and maybe even to accept myself a
little bit more as I am. And I was thinking
about all kinds of weird examples of knowing more and
(22:44):
areas of ignorance that are then revealed to us, Like
when Georgia was in like fourth grade, we went to
a field trip and we went to the local recycling
center and they showed us exactly what happens to the
things that we are collecting in all of our individual
house is that are going on the truck every Friday,
And what, for instance, ruins a pile of recycling. If
(23:06):
you put this in there and they discover it, then
they have to wash the whole thing, or this is
what can really be composted, and then this is what
ruins a pile of composts. The whole thing has to
be thrown out. Can you think of any examples where
you had the super huge AJA that caused you to
live differently and potentially better. I thought a lot about
(23:29):
the way that this time of COVID and all of
this forced slow down, and for those of us who
have been staying home and who haven't had to be
on the front lines of this thing, we've been living differently.
I don't think it's an accident that the level to
(23:50):
which people are waking up in the wake of George
Floyd's death is happening in part because as there was
room for it, because we all were operating on a
different frequency, in a different bandwidth, and we all were
feeling the rawness and the vulnerability of there being this
(24:14):
invisible virus and getting so much misinformation about it. I
think that that's what this period of time feels like
to me, I feel like I am using it to
peel back as many layers as I can, to understand
as much as I can, and to ultimately do as
much as I can. Well, the other thing is that
(24:36):
there aren't as many distractions. You can read the whole
article because you're not packing your suitcase for the next day,
and then you're not racing from one plane to the next,
and then you're not watching the Warriors potentially win the
NBA title for a sixth time, and you know, like
there's nothing on TV, there's nothing to do, and so
it has created this openness, but there is a fatigue
that I just want to acknowledge. Around knowing what you
(24:59):
don't know and desiring to know that and committing to
knowing that, is that a fatigue kicks in. It sort
of reminded me of this crazy interaction I had with
my mom on the eve of her seventy birthday. So
my mom is a funny lady, She's very committed to us.
She's eighty now lives alone in Villanova, and I said, hey,
(25:19):
my I have an idea for your birthday. My two
brothers and I were going to chip in and get
you something A little more substantial, and she said, oh,
I've been thinking about this. I know exactly what I
want for my birthday, Kelly. And I was like, oh
my god, she's gonna say like a new car, you know,
like I've really painted us into a corner here. And
then she said, I would like to say that if
(25:42):
there is any problem that you or your brothers have
that there's something I can do about it, I would
like to know. And I was like, god, Mom, like,
that's sort of the nicest thing anemies ever said. She said,
hold on, the second part of my gift is if
there is any problem that you or your brothers have
(26:04):
that there is not one thing on earth that I
can do to make better, I would like to not
know about it. I am tired. I don't want to
know that Edward's job is if he I don't want
to know that George's needs hurt. I don't want to
know that Claire didn't get to start in her game.
If I can help, I'm there. I feel that with
for instance, climate change, where you're like, please tell me
(26:26):
what can I do? I mean, I remember at the
end of Inconvenient Truth, I was like, if you don't
give me ten things to do. I'm going to die.
And it's the same with racism in America. What you're
talking about in part is trauma and action. And in
Bessel vander Kolch's great book, The Body Keeps the Score,
he's one of the leading experts on trauma in the world.
(26:49):
He talks about the way that those who are able
to actually take action was in a traumatic event do
a better in the long run then those who are
trapped in the burning car or helpless to save someone
who's pinned under a building where there's nothing that can
(27:10):
be done. And when action can be taken, there's this
feeling of efficacy and movement and room. Who can I call?
What can I do? Where can I donate? Where can
I show up? Where can I protest? Where can I march?
How do we hold all that and not be paralyzed
by it? You know, it's interesting to think about how
(27:33):
hard and complex progresses and how if that message gets oversimplified,
if we're afraid to share the uneven herky jerky two
steps forward, one step back nature of most progress that
people on their own individual journeys as soon as they
(27:53):
discover a pothole. Thank god, this must be really bad,
and it's like, oh no, no, no, no no, this is it.
This is exactly how it goes. Our ethos as Americans
is to tell the story that we broke free from
the British and we put a flag in the land
and it's been great ever since and it gets better
every day. And that's of course not true. And I
(28:15):
think to diminish that message or to obscure that information
is really to all of our detriment, because you need
the proper amount of stamina. Right after nine eleven, William
Faulkner's Nobel acceptance speech made its way around the world
(28:37):
of writers. In it, he describes the sentence that I
remember most is I declined to accept the end of man.
And it's an exhortation two people who are making art
to continue to make art because it still matters. I've
thought so many times in in these months of pandemic,
(28:59):
about the influenza epidemic of eighteen and I've been very
interested in speaking to my really elderly friends. I have
an aunt who's ninety six, who I speak to all
the time, and who's very wise, and to hear her,
I mean, she's shaken. There's a lot happening, and we're
(29:21):
in a moment where the whole world really is trembling,
but the context of it's not the first moment. And
I think for our generation, I have no memory of
Kennedy getting shot or or Dr King or Malcolm X
or RFK. I have no memory of any of that.
And I think our generation has never really suffered, and
(29:45):
it's like we don't have muscles for it. We're not
the toughest generation. We're a little atrophied. We're not the
toughest generation, and we're not the toughest country. Clearly, I
want to make the case for knowing more, and so
I wrote down reasons why it's worth knowing what you
don't know, and I just want to get your thoughts
(30:06):
on each one. So one is that the discovery is
likely to come. As you said at the top, secrets
are like taxic waste. They don't disintegrate. They just move
around and they reform themselves in smaller spaces. But they're coming.
It must be your strong conviction that it always comes out. Oh,
(30:28):
I absolutely see that, whether it's I mean, look, my
parents took their secret to the grave with them and
it still came out. Yeah, they must have thought we
made it. Yeah, they accomplished what they set out to do,
but no, absolutely, whether it's generational, it's the next generation,
or it's even the generation after Carl Jung called secrets
(30:50):
psychic poison, it never goes away. People have said to me,
I don't know what to do, and my only response
is they're going to find out. So the question is
only are they going to find out from you? Which
is always going to be better, not comfortable, but better
for it's a reckoning really, like while you're still on
(31:13):
the planet. Right, one of my friends found out that
her father had been having an affair for many years,
and it just caused her to like rethink her entire childhood.
And it's really unsettling to look back and think, how
many lies did you tell me? Did you tell me
like five thousand lies? What does that mean about what's
true of me? So I think that there's a level
(31:36):
of damage that is pretty pervasive when you discover that
somebody kept something under wraps. Another thing that I wrote
down about the case for knowing more is that when
you know more, you can find your people. So if
I said I have the courage to discover whether I'm
genetically predisposed to have cancer again, and I get the
(31:58):
tests back and I find that I am, and now
I know my kids might be. But now I also
know that like three people on my block are the same.
And I also know that the eighteen year old who
used to babysit my girls, she knows that she has
this genetic predisposition. The potential for intimacy around this stuff
(32:21):
is enormous, And in fact, I think intimacy thrives on
things like this, things you're afraid of, things that you
have shame around, as Mr Rogers said, like if it's mentionable,
it's manageable, and in the process of managing with others
like you, there is terrific potential for intimacy. That's so beautiful. Kelly,
(32:46):
and I think that this time we're living in we're
also overwhelmed by technology, and there's just endless reasons to
not love the connectivity and the Internet and the availability
of so much information all the time. But one of
the beautiful aspects is that we find the people like
(33:10):
us if we know the truths of ourselves. Where there
are secrets, it's always because there's shame. Shame causes or
is part of this sense of isolation. I'm the only
person in the world that this has happened to. I'm
the only person in the world like me. No one
would understand this. People keep secrets from each other because
(33:32):
they think if I told anyone this, they would shun me.
I would be mortified. I tell you a quick story.
There was one time where I was leading this writing
retreat for a couple of hundred people, and I gave
them this prompt at the very end of a weekend.
I said, I'm gonna give you three minutes. No one
(33:53):
is going to see what you wrote. You can throw
it away, you can burn it. I want you to
take three minutes, and I want you to write the
thing that if anyone knew about you, you would die
of mortification. Okay, start And I looked around the room
and no one hesitated. It wasn't like people were sitting
there looking at the ceiling thinking I don't know what
(34:13):
that thing would be, that thing that that I'm so
ashamed about. I have no idea. And it was such
a revelation to me to see that. But I also
I would never have done this, but I would have
loved to have taken a step further and then said, Okay,
now everyone put those pieces of paper in a basket,
and now we're going to all read them aloud. I
didn't do that. It would have been a breach of trust.
(34:34):
But what would have happened. Everyone would have been nodding,
everyone would have been crying, everyone would have been saying me,
to me, to me too. But there's something about human
nature that makes us think that it's us that we're alone.
I mean, when I found out about my dad, I
felt like an alien who had crashed onto earth and
(34:54):
that no one would ever understand. And of course there
was this world of people. And in the world of
of illness there is a world of people. And in
the world of grief there is a world of people.
And in every kind of gender fluidity there is a
world of people, and and in everything that anyone has
ever been through, there is a world of people. And
(35:17):
yet we remain in these places that are so driven
by fear. I'm so amused and delighted every time I
go to like a really good magazine store and they
have Southern quilter or triplicate bridge players, like these really
specific communities, and it's right there in front of you.
(35:39):
In this enormous display of a hundred magazines. There are
people who do everything. There are people who do and
have lived through everything. There are eight billion people alive.
No one is alone. It's really an powerfully true statement
that no one is actually alone. And cross that with
the internet and then you realize you can find them
(36:01):
now and it's never too late, because I think the
shame of having kept a secret for a long time
stops people from being able to bear the idea of
they're going to be confronted with how could you not
have told me this? But if you combine the fact
that the secrets always end up coming out and what
(36:25):
you said about people then thinking well if you lie
to me about that, what else did you lie to
me about? And being left with a kind of reshuffling
or reordering of an entire history which is unnecessary. People
need permission to know that even though it's not going
to be easy, it is going to be okay. And
you know what, even if it's not okay, it's okay
(36:48):
because it's the truth and it's better. It's better. It's
like the air has been lightened, this burden has been released.
The final thing that's so lovely about knowing more and
sharing more and sort of setting aside your shame in
(37:08):
order to do so. Is that's the only way you're
going to know that you could actually be loved as
you are, because if you're playing a different game, if
you're projecting something that isn't quite true, then you must
have the secret fear that if they knew, like all
(37:29):
those poor people in your writing class, if they thought
that the person next to them was going to read it,
they would assume you will not want to know me.
We will not become friends. When you see this, and
that transcendent, beautiful truth is they will want to know you.
They will not avoid you, they will not be afraid
(37:50):
of you. The opposite, They'll be drawn to you, and
they'll be attracted to you to your essence. I have
no ever seen any situation in which that is not
the case. That's perfect, that's perfect. Well, thank you so
much for doing this such a pleasure. It was a
great conversation. So here are my takeaways, but you can
(38:15):
find at medium dot com slash at Kelly. I think
twice before you spit into a plastic bile and send
it away. Secrets are like toxic waste. They never go away.
In the absence of knowing the truth, children will make
up stories, and in those stories, they will be the
deeply flawed central character. The question isn't are they going
(38:40):
to find out? The question is are they going to
find out? From you? I never would have thought I'd
have something in common with William Faulkner, but I too,
decline to accept the end of man. Freedom is knowing
the whole story. Freedom requires knowing the whole story, even
if it hurts with trauma. Those who can take action,
(39:05):
even action that doesn't change the outcome, fair better than
those who are merely acted upon. And finally, good news.
You are not unique. There is another person, at least one,
who has had this, felt this, done this. The reward
(39:26):
for sharing is intimacy. Thank you to Danny Shapiro. Thank
you to Medium for production support on the series. Kelly Corgan.
Wonders is produced by Susan George and our sound editor
is Dean K. Terry. I'll see you next time. Thanks
for being here.
High Family Secrets. Family. It's Danny here with the first
bonus episode we're dropping as we get busy producing brand
new episodes for the next season. Today, I'm sharing a
conversation between myself and the utterly wonderful Kelly Corrigan, whose podcast,
Kelly Corrigan Wonders is a treasure trove of special deep
(00:27):
dives with guests such as Austin Channing Brown, Margaret Atwood,
George Saunders, Gia Tolentino, Anna Quinlin, Kate Bohler, and oh
my got so many more amazing thinkers. I was honored
when Kelly asked me to unpack a platitude that I
suspect is near and dear to Family Secrets listeners. What
we don't know can't hurt us, agree or disagree. I
(00:52):
hope you'll listen and enjoy, and remember, we're also revamping
listener stories, which are now going to be called Danny's Listening,
in which we'll listen to a story someone is called
in and I'll respond. So, if you want to share
your family's secret story, just call one eight Secret zero.
That's one eight Secret and the number zero. Hi. I'm
(01:29):
Kelly Corrigan, and today I'm wondering about the allure of
ignorance and it's promise of bliss, and in what ways
what we don't know might indeed be hurting us and
for that matter, hurting others. So I was reading this
funny piece on Medium, my production partner for this series,
about how much everybody thinks they know and how very
(01:53):
little it turns out we actually do know, for instance, toilets,
like how many people really know how a toilet works?
How many people even want to know how a toilet works?
So I've been curious about the weight of knowledge for years,
and I'm more sensitive than ever to the burden of
knowing what's in your kids texts, what's in the one
(02:15):
thousand page piece of legislation you're so sure you support?
What's in our food, our air, our d n A,
who makes our laptop? What do our in laws really
think of us? How much is the guy sitting next
to us actually getting paid with me for this deep dive?
Is Danny Shapiro. You may have read one of her
(02:35):
novels or memoirs. I think she has like nine books
to her name, and you may well be one of
the millions who are plugging into her podcast family secrets
high Kelly. Before we get into this conversation, we're going
to do a quick speed round so everybody can get
a quick sense of you. Danny Shapiro, what book have
(02:56):
you read more than once? Many? Actually, but I'm going
to shooes Wallace Stegner's Crossing to Safety, which I try
to reread every couple of years, sort of a literary
soul palate cleansera. Do you have a go to mantra
for hard times? I do. It comes from my friend,
the Buddhist teacher Sylvia Borstein, who speaks to herself as
(03:19):
a beloved person, says to herself, may I meet this
moment fully? May I meet it as a friend? Other
than what you don't know won't hurt you? What platitude
makes you crazy? Can I pick two? Everything happens for
a reason and God doesn't give us more than we
can handle. They're essentially the same platitude. They mean it
(03:42):
to be comforting, but when you are the person on
the receiving end of that, you have been given more
than you can handle, and there is absolutely no sense
that you have that there is a reason for it,
And so there is just this feeling of something being
painted over. Yes, And you're an odd enough for the moment, right,
So you have a particularly interesting relationship to knowing more
(04:06):
as you recently uncovered something utterly fundamental about your identity.
So about four years ago, my husband and I sent
away for a DNA test, just the over the counter
recreational DNA testing, really because he wanted to, and I
just went along with it, not for any reason, not
(04:28):
out of any curiosity. I thought I knew everything about
where I came from, who my parents were, who my
ancestors were, what my ethnicity was. This test was so
uninteresting to me that I forgot that I had even
spit into the plastic file. It just wasn't a big deal.
When the results came back, it was pretty quickly revealed
(04:52):
to me that the dad who raised me, who I adored,
and who I lost in a car at in it
when I was twenty three, and my relationship with whom
really defined so much of my childhood, teenage years, adult life,
my literary life. I found out that he had not
(05:14):
been my biological father, which was something that I had
never consciously entertained, never ever occurred to me, And in
terms of what we don't know, panther won't hurt us.
That led me into this deep dive into these twin mysteries.
(05:37):
And the first mystery was, well, if my father wasn't
my biological father, who is? And the other was what
did my parents know? And was this something that was
actively kept as a secret from me all my life?
Was this something that my parents and maybe even other
people too, knew about me that I didn't know about myself.
(06:01):
So when you first put it together, did you think
I really wish I didn't know this. I would much
rather have the story stay stable, that this man that
I love so much, that's such a part of my
identity that I've been grieving for twenty or thirty years.
I wish I never spit in the vial. Not for
(06:21):
a single second did I feel that way. That's so
interesting to me. I was really crazy about my dad too.
I feel like I'd throw the information across the room
and run away and say like, oh, I don't believe you.
It's it's a mistake. I did go through those steps.
When the first signs were there, the breakdown of my
ethnicity made no sense. I found ways to justify that
(06:44):
my ethnicity should have been that I was nearly a
hundred percent Eastern European Oshkenazi. I was raised in a
Jewish home. Both of my parents were Eastern European Oshgnazi Jews,
and my ethnicity came back that I was half Swedish, Irish,
French German, and I just I was like, no, no, no, no,
it must simply be wrong, or maybe all Jews are
(07:08):
mongrels in some way, and maybe it's possible to be.
As I went on with each step becoming clearer and
clearer that this really was the case, I was definitely
like a little kid sticking my fingers in my ears,
going la la la, la, la la la until it
(07:28):
was irrefutable. How many minutes, hours, days, weeks, months until
you called your mother or had shearity passed? Oh, she
had passed? There was no one to call. I think
one of the things that happened really pretty quickly, and
I don't want to underplay how painful it was. It
was painful and shocking, but I also didn't wish I
(07:52):
didn't know it because it made a kind of immediate, crazy,
deep profound sense. I mean, I remember within twenty four
hours just feeling like, uh so that was what was
going on. That's why everyone who ever met me told
(08:17):
me that I didn't look Jewish. That's why people constantly
commented on that I didn't look like my family, because
I didn't. I just thought it was some genetic quirk.
But it was staring me in the face in the
mirror in a physical resemblance sense, but in a much
deeper way, Kelly, it was something didn't add up. I always,
(08:41):
as a child felt other different, like I sort of
had my nose pressed to the glass. Something about me
didn't make sense to me. I didn't feel like I
belonged in this large, extended family who I loved and
was very proud to be part of. But I didn't
feel like I belonged. And it was such a strange feeling.
(09:04):
I mean, when you're a child and you have those feelings,
you have to supply a narrative. And the narrative that
I supplied was there must be something wrong with me
that I'm feeling this way. And so in the wake
of this discovery, I really felt like a huge and
(09:26):
massive mystery, a kind of subtle disconnect that I had
carried with me all my life, with all of my
exploration as a writer, as someone who publicly contemplates for
a living and for my art. I was like missing
the bulls eye. I kept on throwing arrows, but I
(09:49):
knew that I was missing my mark. I knew it,
but I didn't know what that meant. It just felt
like something must just be wrong with me, that it
doesn't all add up. So you have done thirty some
episodes of this podcast called Family Secrets, and Family Secrets
is exactly what it sounds like. It's somebody coming on
and talking to you about a family secret. Is it
(10:11):
your conclusion that in almost all those cases, they too
have like a niggling sense that something screwy, that something's
not adding up. Is that a feature of many stories
where you come to know something absolutely? It is in
almost all of the story. Is where a secret has
been withheld in that way where it has to do
(10:34):
with identity or with a closely held family secret about
a tragedy, a loss, there is a sense on the
part of the person from whom it's been withheld that
something hasn't felt right as you did. Do people typically
pin that on themselves. Is it sort of eating away
(10:55):
at people's self esteem that they're feeling this sense of misalignment,
certainly in the case of misattributed parentage, but when it
comes to someone's parents not having been their biological parent
and them never having known that, or cases where someone
(11:16):
is adopted and has never been told, there is absolutely
across the board almost the same language that's used. Of
It felt like something didn't make sense to me about me.
I didn't add up. It's so sad. I had cancer
in my thirties and we went to see the doctors.
And then after we got organized about what I was
(11:38):
going to do and when chemo would start and all that,
then I said, what do we do with these kids?
We have a two year old and a one year old,
And they said until kids are eight, they sort of
believe that everything is about them. And so the doctor
was saying to you, your kids should just know this.
It should not be something that's kept from them. And
(11:59):
thank goodness of the wisdom of that doctor, because even
to this day, in medical situations, information that's withheld. Everybody's
sparing each other, you know what I mean, Yeah, except
there they think they are. It's in the name of protection,
it's in the name of love. And one of the
things that I learned in my story when I really
(12:21):
started researching it is that at the time that my
parents were experiencing infertility, my father was unable to get
my mother pregnant basically, and they ultimately used a sperm donor.
And this was in the nineteen sixties. And every piece
(12:42):
of research that I did, every book that I read,
every magazine article that I read, basically contained also the
same language from the medical community, which was the child
must never know. Go home and never tell anyone. Don't
tell others, siblings, don't tell your parents, don't tell your
(13:03):
sisters or brothers, don't tell your friends. It will be
as if it never happened, because what we don't know
won't hurt us. It's in the literature because their parents
were told the child must never know, it actually became,
in most cases so buried inside the psyches of the
parents that it became like almost dissolved, almost like it
(13:31):
didn't exist at all. Except secrets don't work that way.
Secrets never go away. Secrets are like toxic waste. They
never go away, and when they're not dealt with head on,
they leach into everything surrounding them, so that the air
that I was breathing when I was growing up was
(13:53):
confused air. It was two parents who knew what they
had done, but had decided that it had never happened,
and so when they looked at me, they saw their
own secret that they had buried. One thing that's interesting
about the thing that your parents kept from you and
(14:15):
from all your guests on family secrets is that not
only did they keep it, but they are keeping it
like it's a daily thing. And that I think is
one of the most unsettling things about what you don't
know and and why Ultimately it's such a crusher when
your ignorance is removed. There's all sorts of things that
(14:37):
are painful and heavy to know and to live with,
and that are being kept from us, that are being
smoothed over by various institutions and organizations that we have
to deal with in American society, for instance, how the
United States operated in Vietnam, or what is in Donald
Trump's tax code, what goes into a piece of wonderbread,
(14:59):
what's in your kids nexts. But nonetheless, there's zero progress,
as is true for a human being, right there's zero
personal progress, and there's also zero societal progress if we're
living with manipulated information absolutely. The tagline for family secrets
is the secrets that are kept from us, the secrets
(15:19):
we keep from others, and the secrets we keep from ourselves.
And I actually find the secrets that we keep from
ourselves perhaps the most poignant of those kinds of secrets.
I don't believe that my parents stayed awake at night
(15:40):
in the dark whispering to each other in their bed
about how they were keeping this secret from their child.
I don't believe that they ever spoke of it again.
And so it also leached into their marriage, which was
a very contentious and unhappy marriage. My mother was contemptuous
of my father. My father there was depressed, and you know,
(16:02):
I spent my life as a writer trying to dig
into why my parents were the way they were, and
all of the narratives that I supplied were true, they
just weren't the whole truth. And so on family secrets.
At the end of every interview, I always asked my guest,
do you wish you didn't know? Every single time, I
have yet to have a single guest say, yeah, I
wish I hadn't known. I feel like this knowledge that
(16:26):
I have and that I have now had for the
last four years is like a superpower. I remember calling
a therapist that I had seen for years, because when
you make a discovery like this, you can't go to
somebody new. And when I called her, she said, you know,
there was always a subtle disconnect. And I was like,
(16:50):
what do you mean? And she said, the woman sitting
across from me, like, what you were narrating about your
life and your fildhood and what your affect was, and
your presentation and your energy they didn't mesh. And I
(17:11):
mean to take that a step further. My mother in law,
who was this really wise, wonderful woman who had known
my mother, and my mother was quite difficult. She said
to me, sweetheart, I don't know how you survived your childhood.
You must have a hell of a constitution. And I
(17:32):
looked at her, and I remember thinking, she's right, I do.
I did not come from two people who had a
hell of a constitution, either one of them in any way,
both in terms of nature and in terms of nurture.
And yet I did have something within me that I
(17:53):
didn't understand, and I couldn't have articulated that to you.
At the time. All I knew was this doesn't add up.
When Danny and I talked, I had just come back
from Montgomery, Alabama, where I spent two days with civil
rights attorney Brian Stevenson. He's the just Mercy guy talking
about how knowing more about our nation's history, like the
(18:17):
full story, not the heroes only highlight reel, might be
the only way forward for America and our racial reckoning.
I just spent a whole bunch of time with Brian
Stevenson for this PBS show that I'm doing, and we
talked a lot about truth and reconciliation in the United
States around race relations, going from slavery to Jim Crow,
(18:40):
to lynching to police brutality, these four major movements in
American history. And he said, I think everybody owes it
to themselves and to their nation to look at your
family history under the lens of racism and slavery. Now
look at the college you went to, like how did
that college benefit from it? Now look at where you bank,
(19:02):
how does that bank operate? Now look at your homeowners association,
and keep looking at every circle you're in for a
more truthful, complete accounting of that organization's history. It is
more comfortable in many ways to not know everything about
(19:23):
our country, everything about our spouse, everything about our town,
everything about our children. My son is actually my son
is twenty one, but he has left his journal literally open,
sitting on a table in our house, and I've never
looked at I think I would have if I was
worried about him. I never have need to do that.
I just want to admit I could never walk past
(19:45):
an open journal. If I saw it, I would be like,
this is a sign I'm supposed to look at it.
Maybe she wants me to look. You know, I have
all kinds of like mantal gymnastics that I'll do around
things to justify what I know would be infuriating if
someone were to do it to me. Well, my mother
my journal. So I think that that just cured me
in my desire to be nothing like her. There are
certain just clear sort of lines in the sand of
(20:06):
like I won't cross that. My mom read my journal
and I got grounded for an entire month of ninth
grade because I had written down in my journal curse words,
and she said that is so filthy. I can't believe
how long that list was. And you're grounded for a month.
I'm glad she didn't read my journalist. Hey, I was like,
that's pretty innocent, right. So when I was listening to
(20:29):
the researcher talk about nature versus nurture, you think about,
as a parent, how desperately you want my parental moves,
at least my best ones, to count to land to
have the impact that I so desire. Yeah, exactly. I
mean when I was on the road, I had a
lot of people in my audiences who were parents, parents
(20:52):
of biological kids, parents of adopted kids, of donor conceived kids,
and I started getting a lot of push back and
kind of angry threatened comments during the Q and A
s and like, basically, what are you saying? Are you
saying that nature trump's nurture? What are you saying to us?
(21:13):
And of course that's not remotely what I was saying,
But I thought, that's so interesting. Why are people feeling
this way? And what I came to understand is that
we so desperately want nurture to be all that matters
because we believe that we can control it. Well, you know,
it's so interesting. I found that the new information that
(21:36):
science is sort of generally rallying around this idea that
what we've considered to be personality traits are driven by
our genetic code. I found that enormously freeing. A big
promise of knowing more is that you will be perhaps uncomfortable,
and you will perhaps be at sea a little bit.
But ultimately there are certain freedoms that come with the
(21:59):
full story. And a freedom for me was, Oh, maybe
you shouldn't be so insistent that your kid makes some change,
because maybe that's just written into them. That's like saying,
like change your eye color, grow another inch, you know,
be a faster runner. It's pushing them to change in
(22:21):
ways that maybe they're not capable of changing. And so
to me, just knowing that additional piece of information cause
me to accept my kids a little bit more just
as they are, and maybe even to accept myself a
little bit more as I am. And I was thinking
about all kinds of weird examples of knowing more and
(22:44):
areas of ignorance that are then revealed to us, Like
when Georgia was in like fourth grade, we went to
a field trip and we went to the local recycling
center and they showed us exactly what happens to the
things that we are collecting in all of our individual
house is that are going on the truck every Friday,
And what, for instance, ruins a pile of recycling. If
(23:06):
you put this in there and they discover it, then
they have to wash the whole thing, or this is
what can really be composted, and then this is what
ruins a pile of composts. The whole thing has to
be thrown out. Can you think of any examples where
you had the super huge AJA that caused you to
live differently and potentially better. I thought a lot about
(23:29):
the way that this time of COVID and all of
this forced slow down, and for those of us who
have been staying home and who haven't had to be
on the front lines of this thing, we've been living differently.
I don't think it's an accident that the level to
(23:50):
which people are waking up in the wake of George
Floyd's death is happening in part because as there was
room for it, because we all were operating on a
different frequency, in a different bandwidth, and we all were
feeling the rawness and the vulnerability of there being this
(24:14):
invisible virus and getting so much misinformation about it. I
think that that's what this period of time feels like
to me, I feel like I am using it to
peel back as many layers as I can, to understand
as much as I can, and to ultimately do as
much as I can. Well, the other thing is that
(24:36):
there aren't as many distractions. You can read the whole
article because you're not packing your suitcase for the next day,
and then you're not racing from one plane to the next,
and then you're not watching the Warriors potentially win the
NBA title for a sixth time, and you know, like
there's nothing on TV, there's nothing to do, and so
it has created this openness, but there is a fatigue
that I just want to acknowledge. Around knowing what you
(24:59):
don't know and desiring to know that and committing to
knowing that, is that a fatigue kicks in. It sort
of reminded me of this crazy interaction I had with
my mom on the eve of her seventy birthday. So
my mom is a funny lady, She's very committed to us.
She's eighty now lives alone in Villanova, and I said, hey,
(25:19):
my I have an idea for your birthday. My two
brothers and I were going to chip in and get
you something A little more substantial, and she said, oh,
I've been thinking about this. I know exactly what I
want for my birthday, Kelly. And I was like, oh
my god, she's gonna say like a new car, you know,
like I've really painted us into a corner here. And
then she said, I would like to say that if
(25:42):
there is any problem that you or your brothers have
that there's something I can do about it, I would
like to know. And I was like, god, Mom, like,
that's sort of the nicest thing anemies ever said. She said,
hold on, the second part of my gift is if
there is any problem that you or your brothers have
(26:04):
that there is not one thing on earth that I
can do to make better, I would like to not
know about it. I am tired. I don't want to
know that Edward's job is if he I don't want
to know that George's needs hurt. I don't want to
know that Claire didn't get to start in her game.
If I can help, I'm there. I feel that with
for instance, climate change, where you're like, please tell me
(26:26):
what can I do? I mean, I remember at the
end of Inconvenient Truth, I was like, if you don't
give me ten things to do. I'm going to die.
And it's the same with racism in America. What you're
talking about in part is trauma and action. And in
Bessel vander Kolch's great book, The Body Keeps the Score,
he's one of the leading experts on trauma in the world.
(26:49):
He talks about the way that those who are able
to actually take action was in a traumatic event do
a better in the long run then those who are
trapped in the burning car or helpless to save someone
who's pinned under a building where there's nothing that can
(27:10):
be done. And when action can be taken, there's this
feeling of efficacy and movement and room. Who can I call?
What can I do? Where can I donate? Where can
I show up? Where can I protest? Where can I march?
How do we hold all that and not be paralyzed
by it? You know, it's interesting to think about how
(27:33):
hard and complex progresses and how if that message gets oversimplified,
if we're afraid to share the uneven herky jerky two
steps forward, one step back nature of most progress that
people on their own individual journeys as soon as they
(27:53):
discover a pothole. Thank god, this must be really bad,
and it's like, oh no, no, no, no no, this is it.
This is exactly how it goes. Our ethos as Americans
is to tell the story that we broke free from
the British and we put a flag in the land
and it's been great ever since and it gets better
every day. And that's of course not true. And I
(28:15):
think to diminish that message or to obscure that information
is really to all of our detriment, because you need
the proper amount of stamina. Right after nine eleven, William
Faulkner's Nobel acceptance speech made its way around the world
(28:37):
of writers. In it, he describes the sentence that I
remember most is I declined to accept the end of man.
And it's an exhortation two people who are making art
to continue to make art because it still matters. I've
thought so many times in in these months of pandemic,
(28:59):
about the influenza epidemic of eighteen and I've been very
interested in speaking to my really elderly friends. I have
an aunt who's ninety six, who I speak to all
the time, and who's very wise, and to hear her,
I mean, she's shaken. There's a lot happening, and we're
(29:21):
in a moment where the whole world really is trembling,
but the context of it's not the first moment. And
I think for our generation, I have no memory of
Kennedy getting shot or or Dr King or Malcolm X
or RFK. I have no memory of any of that.
And I think our generation has never really suffered, and
(29:45):
it's like we don't have muscles for it. We're not
the toughest generation. We're a little atrophied. We're not the
toughest generation, and we're not the toughest country. Clearly, I
want to make the case for knowing more, and so
I wrote down reasons why it's worth knowing what you
don't know, and I just want to get your thoughts
(30:06):
on each one. So one is that the discovery is
likely to come. As you said at the top, secrets
are like taxic waste. They don't disintegrate. They just move
around and they reform themselves in smaller spaces. But they're coming.
It must be your strong conviction that it always comes out. Oh,
(30:28):
I absolutely see that, whether it's I mean, look, my
parents took their secret to the grave with them and
it still came out. Yeah, they must have thought we
made it. Yeah, they accomplished what they set out to do,
but no, absolutely, whether it's generational, it's the next generation,
or it's even the generation after Carl Jung called secrets
(30:50):
psychic poison, it never goes away. People have said to me,
I don't know what to do, and my only response
is they're going to find out. So the question is
only are they going to find out from you? Which
is always going to be better, not comfortable, but better
for it's a reckoning really, like while you're still on
(31:13):
the planet. Right, one of my friends found out that
her father had been having an affair for many years,
and it just caused her to like rethink her entire childhood.
And it's really unsettling to look back and think, how
many lies did you tell me? Did you tell me
like five thousand lies? What does that mean about what's
true of me? So I think that there's a level
(31:36):
of damage that is pretty pervasive when you discover that
somebody kept something under wraps. Another thing that I wrote
down about the case for knowing more is that when
you know more, you can find your people. So if
I said I have the courage to discover whether I'm
genetically predisposed to have cancer again, and I get the
(31:58):
tests back and I find that I am, and now
I know my kids might be. But now I also
know that like three people on my block are the same.
And I also know that the eighteen year old who
used to babysit my girls, she knows that she has
this genetic predisposition. The potential for intimacy around this stuff
(32:21):
is enormous, And in fact, I think intimacy thrives on
things like this, things you're afraid of, things that you
have shame around, as Mr Rogers said, like if it's mentionable,
it's manageable, and in the process of managing with others
like you, there is terrific potential for intimacy. That's so beautiful. Kelly,
(32:46):
and I think that this time we're living in we're
also overwhelmed by technology, and there's just endless reasons to
not love the connectivity and the Internet and the availability
of so much information all the time. But one of
the beautiful aspects is that we find the people like
(33:10):
us if we know the truths of ourselves. Where there
are secrets, it's always because there's shame. Shame causes or
is part of this sense of isolation. I'm the only
person in the world that this has happened to. I'm
the only person in the world like me. No one
would understand this. People keep secrets from each other because
(33:32):
they think if I told anyone this, they would shun me.
I would be mortified. I tell you a quick story.
There was one time where I was leading this writing
retreat for a couple of hundred people, and I gave
them this prompt at the very end of a weekend.
I said, I'm gonna give you three minutes. No one
(33:53):
is going to see what you wrote. You can throw
it away, you can burn it. I want you to
take three minutes, and I want you to write the
thing that if anyone knew about you, you would die
of mortification. Okay, start And I looked around the room
and no one hesitated. It wasn't like people were sitting
there looking at the ceiling thinking I don't know what
(34:13):
that thing would be, that thing that that I'm so
ashamed about. I have no idea. And it was such
a revelation to me to see that. But I also
I would never have done this, but I would have
loved to have taken a step further and then said, Okay,
now everyone put those pieces of paper in a basket,
and now we're going to all read them aloud. I
didn't do that. It would have been a breach of trust.
(34:34):
But what would have happened. Everyone would have been nodding,
everyone would have been crying, everyone would have been saying me,
to me, to me too. But there's something about human
nature that makes us think that it's us that we're alone.
I mean, when I found out about my dad, I
felt like an alien who had crashed onto earth and
(34:54):
that no one would ever understand. And of course there
was this world of people. And in the world of
of illness there is a world of people. And in
the world of grief there is a world of people.
And in every kind of gender fluidity there is a
world of people, and and in everything that anyone has
ever been through, there is a world of people. And
(35:17):
yet we remain in these places that are so driven
by fear. I'm so amused and delighted every time I
go to like a really good magazine store and they
have Southern quilter or triplicate bridge players, like these really
specific communities, and it's right there in front of you.
(35:39):
In this enormous display of a hundred magazines. There are
people who do everything. There are people who do and
have lived through everything. There are eight billion people alive.
No one is alone. It's really an powerfully true statement
that no one is actually alone. And cross that with
the internet and then you realize you can find them
(36:01):
now and it's never too late, because I think the
shame of having kept a secret for a long time
stops people from being able to bear the idea of
they're going to be confronted with how could you not
have told me this? But if you combine the fact
that the secrets always end up coming out and what
(36:25):
you said about people then thinking well if you lie
to me about that, what else did you lie to
me about? And being left with a kind of reshuffling
or reordering of an entire history which is unnecessary. People
need permission to know that even though it's not going
to be easy, it is going to be okay. And
you know what, even if it's not okay, it's okay
(36:48):
because it's the truth and it's better. It's better. It's
like the air has been lightened, this burden has been released.
The final thing that's so lovely about knowing more and
sharing more and sort of setting aside your shame in
(37:08):
order to do so. Is that's the only way you're
going to know that you could actually be loved as
you are, because if you're playing a different game, if
you're projecting something that isn't quite true, then you must
have the secret fear that if they knew, like all
(37:29):
those poor people in your writing class, if they thought
that the person next to them was going to read it,
they would assume you will not want to know me.
We will not become friends. When you see this, and
that transcendent, beautiful truth is they will want to know you.
They will not avoid you, they will not be afraid
(37:50):
of you. The opposite, They'll be drawn to you, and
they'll be attracted to you to your essence. I have
no ever seen any situation in which that is not
the case. That's perfect, that's perfect. Well, thank you so
much for doing this such a pleasure. It was a
great conversation. So here are my takeaways, but you can
(38:15):
find at medium dot com slash at Kelly. I think
twice before you spit into a plastic bile and send
it away. Secrets are like toxic waste. They never go away.
In the absence of knowing the truth, children will make
up stories, and in those stories, they will be the
deeply flawed central character. The question isn't are they going
(38:40):
to find out? The question is are they going to
find out? From you? I never would have thought I'd
have something in common with William Faulkner, but I too,
decline to accept the end of man. Freedom is knowing
the whole story. Freedom requires knowing the whole story, even
if it hurts with trauma. Those who can take action,
(39:05):
even action that doesn't change the outcome, fair better than
those who are merely acted upon. And finally, good news.
You are not unique. There is another person, at least one,
who has had this, felt this, done this. The reward
(39:26):
for sharing is intimacy. Thank you to Danny Shapiro. Thank
you to Medium for production support on the series. Kelly Corgan.
Wonders is produced by Susan George and our sound editor
is Dean K. Terry. I'll see you next time. Thanks
for being here.
Family Secrets News
Host
Dani Shapiro
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