Sheila Heti – on not keeping secrets.

Toronto, Ontario
October 20, 2000

Dear me,

Why can’t you keep a secret?

You have promised yourself again and again that this – at last – will be the secret you will keep. This will be the precious little secret that will be yours alone to savour and deplete in its own time. Impossible, has never happened, and still you delude yourself. Three times in the last week – big secrets these!

1. That you are smoking a pipe again. You said, as I recall, “I will only do this in my room, alone. I don’t want anybody to know that I am smoking a pipe.” Then you draw it out in front of that girl from class, on the way home. Then you stand outside the building smoking it with those three girls from your Torah group. Even before you go outside the building to smoke, you pull it out. “Look what I got today – a new pipe.” Then you smoked it in front of Felix when he came over tonight, and then Shields when he came over later, and then Tracy yesterday afternoon. This in two days.

2. The novel. Oh no! You weren’t going to tell anyone you were working on a novel. Then having read the whole first goddamn chapter in front of forty people – a terrible way of keeping a first chapter a secret, don’t you think? – you scrapped it (feeling too exposed) and started anew, pledging that this time – this time! – no one would know what you were working on. You would have deceived them all, everybody certain that you were working on that one draft, when secretly, in secret, you were working on another. Leaked. Twice. Today alone. Plus that one time to your agent who of all people you were not going to let know.

And then, 3. that sweet ex-boyfriend who you hadn’t seen in two years. That night you spent together, last weekend when he was in from out of the country, and he told you – as intimate a moment as a person can experience – in the darkness, in bed, while you were at it? just after? “I love you still,” and that – that – that you were not going to share; it was an intimate moment that one, oh yes, and it was going to be sweet, and all yours alone. Was going to be all yours alone.

Shields tells you, “You have no heart. You have heart, lots of heart, but no actual heart. You are a swallow. You flit,” he says. Then tonight you ask, “What do you mean, no heart?” when you have smoked the pipe in front of him, and told him about that intimate moment with the sweet ex-boyfriend that you weren’t going to tell anyone, least of all Shields.

“You don’t let anyone in,” he says.

“But I let everyone in! I reveal everything!”

“Ah yes,” he nods quietly, as though he were the one smoking the pipe, not you, “but it’s like that old thing, where the boy goes out and tries heroin for the first time and then his father says to him, `What did you do tonight?’ `Tried heroin.’ `Sure sure, go to bed.’”

You haven’t heard that one, go on.

“You conceal by revealing.”

You think about it, like it.

“Like Trudeau!” he puts in, to impress you, win you over. “Like me! You, me and Trudeau. None of us has a heart. A single heart.”

You ushered him out. Then thought about it. Could he be right? or was it more of his usual bullshit? Lying in bed you considered it some more. How is it you could separate yourself from someone, close someone off, never open up the littlest room inside you – by revealing everything?

Then after awhile, it hit you! Or no, it didn’t actually hit you. It took several steps, yes, but it soon became apparent that, yes, it does make sense. Because by exposing everything about yourself, by having no secrets, no experience which is yours and yours alone, no thoughts which can be articulated but aren’t, nothing held back and all the worst spilled on the floor, then the difference between you and the other person, between you and any other person, can only be, like an obelisk dropped from the sky, that fundamental block of otherness.

Right, right! That essential otherness that can’t be expressed! That ineluctable core which could never be put into words because it’s not a thought, not a feeling, not an experience, not a secret, just that basic human otherness. And by making that the distance between you and everybody else, and not knowledge about you they don’t have, and not facts about you they don’t know, then the gulf between you and those around you is a thousand-mile-wide gorgon-filled moat. Or maybe their lips are pressed up close and soft, right up against the ineffable. Yes, they’re flat up against that which they could never penetrate, and which you could never, not with the greatest compulsion, reveal!

Relief, understanding.

Then you go out with Carl a week later and he tells you in response to your exquisite sentence or two of certainty, “No, that’s not you. You don’t reveal to conceal. That’s my roommate. Within thirty minutes of meeting her she’s told you all these details about her sex life. You’re not like that at all.”

You start smoking his cigarettes.

I remain your humble servant,

Sheila