Fewer Secrets
I didn’t begin writing because I wanted to become a writer.
I began writing because, after decades of helping organizations explain themselves, I realized I had almost never tried to explain myself.
Those are different assignments.
One rewards precision, discretion, and the ability to disappear behind the work.
The other asks you to step onto the page.
The idea of writing publicly didn’t arrive overnight. It began to percolate six years ago when my friend Steve Shepard asked me to become “Reader One” for his book, The Nation We Knew. We worked together almost daily during the strange isolation of 2020, and as I watched a professional writer wrestle ideas into stories, something unexpected began happening inside me.
Not a decision.
More like a series of nudges.
Stories I hadn’t thought about in years kept surfacing. Moments that had always seemed disconnected began looking as though they belonged to the same life.
Watching Steve write taught me something unexpected.
Every writer chooses different boundaries.
I realized I wasn’t interested in fewer boundaries.
I was interested in choosing them consciously.
For most of my career, people trusted me with consequential work.
Companies considering acquisitions.
Boards navigating uncertainty.
Founders trying to scale.
Executives making decisions that would affect thousands of employees.
Those conversations belonged inside the room.
Over time, I developed a set of rules that served me well.
Understand the company better than the CEO does.
Develop independent sources of truth.
Become a customer.
Test assumptions.
Test courage.
Never seek trust. Earn it.
And above all…
Never become the story.
Those rules served me extraordinarily well.
I don’t remember deciding to carry them into my personal life.
That’s the thing about habits that work.
They stop feeling like choices.
Eventually, they begin to feel like a personality.
Professional discretion quietly became personal silence.
Not because I was hiding.
Because the habit had forgotten where the walls were.
It protected clients.
It protected relationships.
It protected my family.
It protected me.
And, to be fair, it worked.
Selective silence allowed every part of my life to progress on terms that felt right to me.
I don’t regret that.
I don’t think those years were dishonest.
I think they required a different operating system.
I’ve spent a lot of time thinking about the difference between privacy and secrecy.
They’re often treated as though they’re interchangeable.
I don’t think they are.
Privacy establishes a boundary.
It says, “This belongs inside my life.”
Secrecy is something else.
It is an active decision not to disclose something that could be disclosed.
Sometimes that decision comes from fear.
Sometimes from loyalty.
Sometimes from wisdom.
Sometimes simply because the time isn’t right.
For much of my life, I don’t think I was protecting secrets.
I was protecting boundaries.
The problem is that boundaries have a way of expanding.
One day, you realize you haven’t revisited them in years.
You aren’t making fresh decisions anymore.
You’re simply living inside rules that once made perfect sense.
The problem wasn’t the rules.
It was forgetting they were still choices.
One morning, while walking, I heard an idea that lodged somewhere I couldn’t ignore.
The suggestion was simple.
Begin creating personal work, or risk letting your own voice drown in an ocean of machine-generated content.
That wasn’t why I started writing.
But it was the shove that followed years of nudges.
I thought about a sign I had driven past for years.
NO LIFEGUARD ON DUTY.
I wrote the first essay.
At the time, I thought the sign described the world.
After nine essays, I realized it had quietly been describing me as well.
Without intending to, I had begun writing about dyslexia.
Long COVID.
My birth father.
Music.
Failure.
Responsibility.
Not because I had decided to confess.
Because each of those stories had become part of the explanation.
When I wrote The Interruption, I found something I hadn’t seen while living it.
During the worst of Long COVID, I had imposed a rigor on myself.
A heightened intention I didn’t recognize as a choice at the time.
Only in writing it down did I understand it had kept me intact.
For a long time, I thought these were separate stories.
The essays taught me otherwise.
They weren’t exposing hidden truths.
They were integrating truths that had been living in separate rooms.
Looking back, I don’t think the biggest surprise of these first nine essays was what I revealed.
It was discovering that the narrator had been there all along.
The publication needed a name.
The essays had already chosen it.
Fewer Secrets.
Not because I owe anyone my story.
Because I’ve finally given myself permission to choose again, which parts of it belong in public.
The rules that served me at work had quietly become the rules by which I lived.
Some still deserve to.
Others deserve to be examined again.