I Want To Be A Known

When Greta Garbo died, obituaries sprouted across U.S. newspapers, each lacing their farewells with Garbo’s most famous line, “I want to be alone.” Many of the biographies included photos of the once-famous beauty meandering around her NYC neighborhood on one of her frequent walks. She walked, as she lived, alone. "I want to be alone.” The Great Reclusive Garbo got her wish, the press wrote, and look what happened. Garbo shunned the spotlight, and then fame had shunned her, reclaiming the beauty it had ‘given’ her, scouring her face until she was just another old woman in an unremarkable block of the Big Apple, living a recluse’s life on a street too ugly to name.

Amidst all the Garbo upchuck, I found a magazine retrospective who reminded the world that the Swede had uttered, “I vant to be alone”, not as a daily mantra while she beat back the paparazzi with her handbag, but as a line from one of her films. Further, Garbo had clarified her ‘wish’, which was to be left alone, an altogether different request. Still, her refusal to marry, her long vacations to Sweden, and her insistence to live life on her terms labeled her a ‘rebel’, insofar as women of that era could rebel, and the quote became the legend, and the legend became a loner.

I'm not famous, of course, and I’ve never had problems with maintaining my anonymity. I’ve never aspired to fame, except during the occasional fantasies where I discover the fiction writer’s voice that nets me an 8-figure advance and a 30-city, publisher-paid tour where I travel First Class and can bring my son along without his ever missing a day of school or loathing me for making him an expert in airport bathrooms. Even if that were to happen, though, writers are recognized so rarely, relative to television and film stars at least, that I could still live a life of invisibility, and the Writer Persona could remain separate from the Intimate Life I’d created at home.

Apart from my pending catapult to BestSeller #1, I'm not well known, nor have I ever been, not even to those close to me. This unknown-ness began in my teens when a series of events, beginning with a whirlwind marriage and ending with a restraining order, with a whole bunch of .38 caliber bullets thrown in, created a world where I dared not tell anyone what was happening in my life. There was simply too much to risk, and even the smallest reveal could open the whole of the situation to questions and scrutiny. Why was I in that situation? How long had it gone on? Why was I moving again? How many schools had I attended? Why did I move to Florida and then move back 3 months later?

College came and went. I lost the man I loved, I married a wan substitute in response, I battled through a year of misery and then I rebounded with a debacle so epic that people who knew me then refer to that whole period as the CheeseHead Years. Nothing to share there, no anecdotes to dilute the colossal failure of reason and accountability, nothing to do but wait for the pain to subside and the time to distance me from the whole of it. With every year and every further mistake, real or otherwise, my quiet grew until it was my single most defining characteristic. At some point, I realized that I’d smothered so much of my history and so much of my self that even I did not know who I was. My image, self- and otherwise, distorted before the mirrors of my fear. That exacerbated the whole of it, and I shrunk further in, until I clammed up completely. I barely spoke to anyone, and when I did, it was terse, short, and uninviting. I was visible, but I was gone. Hidden.

It wasn’t the obvious type of hiding, where I retreated to the woods and scrubbed myself from society. I wanted people around me, and I wanted them to like me. But to know me? No, not ready for that. Not yet…My mantra for 2 decades was, ‘not yet’. Can I tell him/her/them this? No, not yet. Can I let this go and forgive myself so I can get on with things? Not yet. Is there anything about myself that I know to be real? Not yet. Not quite yet.

This desire to remain unknown, and to be left alone, went to the heart of Me as Human Being, and who I knew myself to be, and to my great and historical dislike of that person. I cut myself off from everyone. I lived with people, committed to people, even married and had a child with someone, and yet, I never showed who I was. I never shared what mattered to me, never opened my heart. Hiding ingrained itself so deeply in me that its etchings appeared on my face. I’m almost 42 years old, and apart from a few feathers at the corners of my eyes, I only have one wrinkle on my face. That crease, a pronounced divot between my eyebrows, is a permanent bend in my flesh, birthed by years of closing my face off whenever someone got too close.

So what about the wisdom that if someone really loves you, then they'll accept you? But how could someone really love me if they didn't really know me? I’d considered it, in the long hours of an evening when I had no date and no friends calling to ease the burn of a loneliness I’d worked so hard to create. I wanted it, and wanted to try, but I refused to risk it. People are human, and humans judge-themselves and each other. Those judgments crease lines into faces, and sometimes, they crush love. Whose fault was that? Mine, of course, since I judged myself first and most harshly, and never gave anyone the chance to judge me. I was no dummy. I’d reject myself first, and then nobody would get to reject me.

I switched gears and touted my soul'd lock-down. I talked openly about how I was hard to get to know, and how nobody knew the Real Me. I asked people all the time, ‘do you know me? Do you think I’m hard to get to know?’ Yes, they answered, dutifully playing their part in my object lesson. Yes, you’re hard to know. No, I don’t know you. No, I can’t figure out how to crack the code. Then I asked a girlfriend, an instructor whose opinion I valued. "No," she said simply. "You're pretty easy to get to know." When I commented on how I kept things to myself and how I kept people at bay. She agreed, noting, "But that doesn't make you hard to know. That makes you unlikable."

Oh.

Was I unlikable because I was hard to know, or was I hard to know and therefore, unlikable? I didn’t know, and there was no way to tell. Who could I ask? Nobody. I was, at long last, completely and utterly alone.

My weight problem stemmed at least in part from this dungeon of loathing, which in turn fed my weight problem. It’s easier to keep people distant when you’re unappealing, and when you have the bi-fecta of soft body and hard heart, you’re the Brink’s Truck of security against heartache. Then again, you’re the worm hole of warmth and love: you might send something out, or perhaps something gets shipped in. But somewhere, things take a dogleg left and the relief never reaches its destination.

So, where am I now? Wishing for fame…? Yes, sometimes, but only so I can spend all day writing and communicating, and sharing me. That’s my goal, and the one with the greatest and most real rewards. My desire to be known, and to be understood, supercedes all fear I have of being discovered or linked to the dark of my past. Those memories still live in me, but they are not me. I’ve battled the demons, and now, with hope on the horizon, my reluctance sheds with every pound.

As a teenager, I wrote a book of poetry in response to the tumult that began my hiatus from human touch. I entitled it, “Whoever Has Time to Listen”. I chose the title completely tongue-in-cheek, figuring none would have time, or, having the time, would read and not hear. I have that volume still, and perhaps some day I’ll open those pages and read them. When I do, I hope I’ll see only the frightened girl who, having seen the shadows, can at last turn away from those darkened figures and walk toward the light that created them.

I’m through hiding. I’m ready to be seen now.

I want to be a known.

A the C(onfessor)