I almost didn’t share it. I almost didn’t hit publish. I almost let that finished piece, nearly too painful to write and way too painful to send out into a might-not-be-so-kind world, sit in a computer folder marked for my heart and my eyes only.

Because it was hard. Because it was personal. Because it was my son and my family and my self bleeding onto a page I could not bear to show.

What would they think of me, naked like this? What would they think of him? What would they think of our family?

But something told me I wasn’t the only one. Something told me there were more out there who needed to hear the words I needed to write in the middle of a too-emotional week. Something told me healing lived in the baring.

So I did it. I hit publish and then I closed my eyes and my computer and walked away from a piece I couldn’t watch crash and burn in the hands of a world that might or might not understand.

All those hours later, I finally opened my computer again, and there were notifications and words and thank yous, people saying they’d had my boy 21 years ago (and look at his amazing life now), people saying they just couldn’t communicate wha tit means to know they’re not alone, people saying the best words of all: You have gifted some healing to me today.

I couldn’t have known, when I sobbed all through the writing of that piece so words blurred and twisted and floated and almost missed the page entirely, what such a baring might do, out in the world. I couldn’t have known that something so incredibly personal and specific and tender would have touched the hearts of so many.

I only knew I had to write what was hidden behind my closed closet door.

In all these days after, I find myself wondering what might have happened if I had chosen not to share, if I had listened to that fear-voice saying it was too personal and it wouldn’t help a piece of the world at all and I should just pretend that I, a woman who runs a parenting blog, have all the perfectly behaved children, of course I do.

“What would happen if one woman told the truth about her life? The world would split open,” says Muriel Rukeyeser.

I hit publish, and the whole world split open. And now I am stepping through its black hole.

///

When I was 11 years old, I started a new school that was really an old one, after two years away. The first day of school I had it easy, because there were friends I remembered who remembered me. Except I was a different me. I’d come back without a dad.

But I didn’t talk about that. I just pretended we hadn’t come back to small-town living to count all our losses.

Just before school started that year my mom bought the first house she could find that came with a mortgage she could afford on her own. Its porch was more holes than wood, and its windows were more rot than pane, and its floors held a rusty orange carpet that didn’t match any of the shabby furniture we’d been given by family.

It was a house that screamed poor.

I spent years too embarrassed to bring friends home, because I didn’t want them to know what we really were, kids who went to bed hungry and didn’t have enough clothes to make it through a week and shivered through the night in our beds because of the way wind could reach right through closed doors and windows and shake us in our sleep.

In seventh grade I had a dance party out on a blacktop just beside our house, and I prayed hard that no one would have to go to the bathroom during the two hours we’d be out there, because I didn’t want anyone going inside and feeling that soft spot on the bathroom floor that might give out any minute and send a leg crashing beneath a falling-apart house.

I hid our truth because I thought I could. It wasn’t hard. I just never let those friends get close enough to come inside my home.

///

It’s not the way I want to live my life.

I want to open the door of home and let them all peer inside, and I want them to see themselves in my word-pictures, and I want them to hear their own stories in my truth.

I want them to know they are not walking and limping and barely-crawling down this confusing and dangerous warrior path toward overcoming alone.

The only way to overcome is to be known.

I knew that some would look into this tender room of my house and they would judge and they would attack and they would try to solve the problem, because this is what they do for themselves, too, but I let their comments roll off and down and away.

I don’t write for the haters. They like to come around, of course they do, because what would a world be without those who judge without knowing or analyze without fully hearing or give that advice we don’t really need?

But if I’m telling the whole truth, I don’t split open for the ones who will tear me further apart. I don’t bleed vulnerability for the ones who can’t relate, who don’t see themselves in the broken places of the world, who refuse to believe they have ever locked any skeletons in a closet.

I write for me and for all those who are still loved and still accepted and still celebrated for who they are, no matter what their past closet or present closet or future closets may look like.

I open the door and I beckon them through and we sit and stare at all the bones we never thought we’d have the courage to share.

There is a mystery here we might never understand: A closet isn’t so scary once we swing it open and let vulnerability light its dark.

///

A best friend betrayal, years ago, locked all my closets tight.

We were never apart those days of our early college years. We prayed together. We cried together. We planned our weddings together, marking the pages of bridal magazines and imagining those elegant dresses and naming each other maid or matron of honor, whoever made it there first.

We were known, down to the deepest parts>

And then something went terribly wrong.

She took all my secrets and twisted them in her hands and spread them into a world that did not know anything but what the first one to speak said, and the first one to speak was her.

I fell off the wall, hard, and I cracked into a hundred thousand pieces, and it was the first time I had ever split open my life voluntarily for any person, and just look what she had done.

I felt destroyed.

And then I felt angry.

And anger turned to resolve.

I would never, ever, ever let anyone else that far in.

Never.

///

There have been potential friends in the years since that best friend betrayal, and there have been tries to do better, to bare myself more, to open this locked door of my house, but fear is never far.

They won’t understand, it says.
Remember what happened last time, it says.
Don’t let them see how messed up you are, it says.

And so they ask a question, and I answer with a happy, Just fine, and I pretend my life and everything in it is easy and perfect and just blissfully fine at all hours of every day.

Except I’ll be in a conversation with someone and find myself blinking away tears because of something they said that reminds me of something my heart has hidden away and I want to dig it from its hiding and throw it out into the world, but I excuse myself, instead, with a hasty, Sorry. Don’t know what’s wrong with me.

We are created to share. We are created to be known. We are created to open wide for the people in our lives so they see all the good and all the bad, too.

Because we all have good and we all have bad.

There will always be those who don’t understand the stories we tell, about the depression we’re living with and the suicide we watched steal the ones we love and a baby who was not exactly what we expected.

But there will always be others who do, and if I can be a piece of healing for the black holes, the locked-tight closets, of this world, I want to be.

It may mean that I have to slide out of the heavy-handed grip of what others think, and it may mean I have to rub away that bruise of judgment more than I’d like (because it will always come), and it may mean I have to turn my back, for now, to the ones who only know how to condemn and criticize and fix a gray problem with a black-and-white, one-size-fits-all solution.

“The only way to know the truth is to live through its casing of lies,” Mark Nepo says.

Its casing of lies looks like a cold, dark closet. It keeps us hidden. It keeps us “safe.” But it keeps us alone, too.

///

Two weeks ago, I sat in an intercessory prayer session with a good friend.

It was for me. I was falling apart, because there was a job that has an end date and no begin-again one, and there was another boy on the way, and there was a first boy whose behavior was writing a story I didn’t want it to write.

My partner prayed and I hunched on a couch, crying, and it didn’t take long for that spirit of rejection to show itself, zipped up tight like a layered winter coat binding generations of parents and grandparents and greats. Binding me.

We prayed its unzipping.

Three times during that two-hour prayer to peel away that rejection and reach toward acceptance and hope and love, I heard the words, Be brave.

No, I wanted to say. I can’t.

Because I knew what brave meant for me, and I knew what it would do to me, and I knew I wasn’t this.

But she heard it, too, and she scrawled the words on a white computer page, along with all those others we heard, and I have that love-letter tucked in my purse for all the moments I forget, when I want to close my mouth instead of tell the truth and I want to close my closet doors instead of open them wide and I want to close my computer instead of share my hard stories.

I re-read those words often.

///

Be vulnerable. Be transparent. Be known. This is what brave looks like.

I am limping into brave, and it is not easy.

It takes courage to tell the story of who we are with our whole hearts. It takes courage to let go of who we think we should be. It takes courage to walk into a world naked and unarmed and unashamed.

Sometimes I don’t have what it takes to knock those protection-walls down. Sometimes I don’t have what it takes to open the door. Sometimes I don’t have what it takes to shine light on all the shadows and dust and secret places in the corners of my heart.

But I have to do it anyway.

Because I know that we are all as unique as the stars in the sky, but we are all the same, too, in our deepest parts. We may not have the same details, because you might be short and I am tall, and you might have one kid and I have five, going on six, and you might carry the rejection of divorce or abuse or homosexuality and I carry the rejection of abandonment and perfection and skinny equals beautiful.

“When I look deeply enough into you, I find me, and when you dare to hear my fear in the recess of your heart, you recognize it as your secret that you thought no one else knew,” says Mark Nepo.

The stories that make a difference in our world are not the ones that point and judge and reprimand. The stories that make a difference are the secrets of our lives.

They’re the stories about a marriage that doesn’t feel quite as easy as it was in the beginning, but we are choosing to keep on keeping on, or we are choosing to let it go. They’re the stories about an anxiety disorder we were ashamed to admit we had. They’re the stories about a postpartum depression so thick we thought we might die.

It’s easy to pretend in a world of social media and too-busy-to-answer-the-how-are-you-question-honestly lives that we don’t all carry a cross, that we don’t all bear the scars of an imperfect life, that we don’t all have wounds that are bleeding through their bandages.

If all we ever do is pretend we don’t carry a cross, we miss the opportunity to help others carry theirs. Because even though our crosses all look different, there are pieces that look the same, and if that same piece is spread to the backs of two or three or five hundred people, it’s a much more bearable load.

So I’ll keep sharing. For me. For you.

For a world that needs splitting wide open.

This is how we begin to heal all the broken places.