The Last Dark Secret about Myself, Carol Oates

This is hard for me because I’m so bad a keeping secrets, like monumentally bad. I believe I only have one.

For subjects I could have approached, let’s see…there’s the crippling depression I’ve lived with for decades, the mania, the bulimia, the terror of what will happen to my son after I die. I could talk about how much I hate autism and how it ripped our lives apart. My fear the world will forget me when I’m gone, that I haven’t left a mark. How much I sometimes resent people who have normal lives. 

If I wanted to go in the direction of something to do with writing, I could have talked about the niggling jealously every writer feels beneath the joy when someone else announces good news, that twinge we aren’t meant to acknowledge. I could also talk about the fear I’m really not good enough and sometime soon someone will out my only secret and that will be the end of my publishing journey. 

But, none of those are really secrets. I’ve talked about them all somewhere at some time. I’m really hopeless. I’d never make a decent undercover reporter. 

I’ve also mentioned my insomnia. That’s not the secret. I get slightly crazy when I don’t sleep. Sometimes I can go two or three nights awake and I personally feel that’s when I do my best writing. Occasionally my dreams are lucid, in that I know I’m dreaming and can control the direction of those dreams. When everything in the real world is shades of grey, I get rare glimpses a world where the only limit is my imagination. 

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I guess my dark secret…my only secret is that I have no secrets. What you see is exactly what you get, so if someone doesn’t like me as I am, I don’t have anything left to give. I can’t try harder because I don’t do half measures. I already give my best. I’m blunt and opinionated, and constantly doubt myself. I fear I’m not as likable as I could be, but for those I love and respect, and those I support or offer my hand to, I do so with every ounce of ability.

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