Growing up in Florida, some songs were ever present. Among them, anything by Jimmy Buffet and Rupert Holmes' "Escape". You may recognize it as "The Pina Colada Song". As a kid, I liked to dance to it and dream about sipping a Pina Colada and seeming mysterious, but I never really listened to the lyric. The song later filled my house as my children watched Shrek again and again. At this point, I listened. I judged. I couldn't believe how the coupled chuckled away the other's indiscretions so easily. I could wrap my brain around people eventually getting over infidelities, imagined or otherwise, but in the song it was so off the cuff that I found it unsettling.
The song was on the radio this week and again I listened closely while, of course, singing along. What struck me this time was the idea that we hide from those we love out of fear that they won't like those parts of us. This was a familiar fear of mine. I was the youngest of 7, but I always felt very alone. My parents had three children each when they married (like The Brady Bunch) and later had me (not like The Brady Bunch). Joking that I was cousin Oliver was how I expressed my discomfort with the whole arrangement. I grew up feeling like an anomaly. I saw my siblings as having tribes and I was the anthropologist, the outside observer. I have one brother who was a singleton, like me, having a different set of parents than the rest. I used to call him the "other only child" in the family. But that was a lie. Shawn was absorbed into the Lisa/Gary tribe, and I was the only one alone. Part of my loneliness was imagined, but some of it was valid. Like many blended families, ours had a rich history of hurt feelings, disappointments, and favoritism. That history preceded me, yet I felt the one responsible. Now, before I receive an onslaught of calls from my very loving siblings who would never want to hurt me, let me jump ahead to the point.
My childhood isolation, real or imagined, created a fear to disclose my truest self. Anything my family would pick on me for betrayed a level of them knowing me that I wasn't comfortable with. So I lied. Compulsively. I lied about everything, and the dumbest things and, like many terrible actors, thought I got away with it. Withdrawing myself from family and ducking out on friends before they got too close were the only ways I could keep my secret identity, well, secret.
Fast forward to the present. I let someone in. All the way into the darkest recesses of my soul. And it felt great. My husband showed me the freedom of honesty. I have come to abhor lies the way ex-smokers view restaurants that allow smoking. This is not to say I don't have my secrets. Don't we all. But the mask has fallen away and I am less likely to smile when I'm hurt or angry or lie to make others not feel so bad when they hurt me. Lying is not my default any longer. I have, of late, ceased any attempts to hide my nerdy, quirky, anti-social tendencies and having come clean, have realized that my attempts to hide were futile all along. I failed to hide myself, and the pieces of me that I have hidden are met with open arms by the people who've loved me all along.
Writing, for me, has been just that, for me. But some of what I write is so infused with my mother, and I'm not the only one who misses her. I would be remiss to hide my secret memorials from those still spellbound by Julie's smile. The rest, the stuff just for me, well it is my honest-to-goodness self buried beneath countless lies. It is silly to think that my friends who laugh at my dumb jokes and hold my hand when I cry wouldn't love the people I've created in my strange little mind. As a teenager, I made silent threats to write books that would show the world how completely dysfunctional my family was. As I've gotten older, and gotten to know other families, that threat gets increasingly less threatening.
The truth is, I feel relieved to discover that people who care about me want to know what I think and want to like what I have to say, a silly excuse for an epiphany, I realize, but here it is nonetheless. Exposing our true selves is terrifying, especially when the stakes are high, when we are afraid of someone walking out of our lives. But the truth, always, sets us free. At least, isn't that the moral to every romantic comedy known to man? When people love us, they love us, warts and all. I think the moral of the song is to not hide. Instead, trusting that when our hidden selves are discovered, when we share who we really are, the people we love will smile and say, "I never knew".
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