I’d like to talk about the difference between writing and publishing. This is something I’ve been meaning to write about for several months now. As you may know, I was fired by my previous employer, in a series of events that revolved around my weblog (and hired two weeks later, but never mind that). It would be incorrect to state, simply, that I was fired for my weblog. I was fired because my manager read my weblog, didn’t like what he saw (specifically this essay on addiction), panicked, thought for some reason that potential clients would see it (which is ridiculous for reasons I will not get into here, other than to say that the structure of the company was such that we as developers were well-hidden from the view of clients behind several layers of business analysts and project managers, and even if I was an exception to this rule because the company wanted to brag about my book to potential clients, I seriously doubt that any of the decision makers at our clients’ companies would be savvy enough to actually look at the book site when my company bragged about it, see my name in the copyright notice of the book, scour the Internet for my name specifically, find my personal weblog, positively identify me as the same person (there are several Mark Pilgrims in the world more famous than I — one is a DJ in South Africa — and at that point I didn’t have the prominent link back to my book that I have now), make the association between one site and the other, actually visit the weblog, find and read the essay in question, be narrow-minded enough to actually be bothered by it in the same way that my manager was, and then hold that against the company I worked for… I mean, come on, do you do that kind of legwork when you hire contractors? It’s not like we contracted with spooks, for God’s sake… so I guess I will go into it here, I think it’s fucking ridiculous and I always will, and I think the manager who panicked and sent this whole chain of events spiraling down an oubliette is an ass, and I’m not blaming him for what happened afterwards but I just wish that he could admit that his rationale for freaking out and inflaming the situation was simply wrong, and my father taught me that it’s better to be right than to be liked, but just for good measure, I happen to know that most if not all of my former co-workers like me and agree with me; as one of them said to me recently in IM: “All the people who matter miss you.”)
Where was I? Writing and publishing. After I got fired, I got lots of sympathy and lots of criticism from lots of people, and the criticism that stuck with me the most is that there is a difference between writing and publishing. You see, after the aforementioned manager told me to tear down my entire weblog and never again have a public persona of my own outside the bounds of the company, I wrote another essay on what it meant to me to be able to write a weblog in the first place. Many, many people responded to that by saying that I could simply have chosen not to write the addiction essay in the first place. Let me state very clearly and emphatically that I have no qualms about dismissing you people outright; you are completely naive, and you Just Don’t Get It. And I don’t mean that in a bad way; I love you people, I really do. You have no idea how lucky you are, and I hope and pray that you never have to find out the hard way how lucky you are today as you live and breathe and work and play in your sheltered state of utter cluelessness. But anyone who reads that essay and Gets It will also Get It when I say that writing it was not a choice, not a decision, and not an act of will. You don’t write a piece like that; it writes you.
But back to that other criticism, the one sitting in the back of my head, nagging me, tugging at my brain stem like a small child saying “lookitme, lookitme” and fidgeting. Of the 70,000 hits I got on my weblog in the week after I was fired (the story was picked up and linked by pretty much everyone), there were exactly 2 people who made the valid point that writing is different than publishing, and that I could have averted the entire situation by writing the addiction essay and not publishing it.
And that, dear friends, is what I want to talk about today.
They are, of course, completely right. Both of them. I could have written the addiction essay and not published it. In fact, there were several minutes in the course of history where it was, in fact, completely written and yet unpublished. Not because I was having second thoughts or even because I was editing it or even re-reading it, but simply because I was going to the bathroom. Really. Writing like that is not something you can put down and start up again, and it took me three hours to write it, and as anyone who knows me personally can tell you, I have the bladder of a pregnant woman and generally can’t go more than an hour without running off behind closed doors and relieving myself. But never mind that. The point is that I came back from the bathroom and immediately published it, because that is the entire reason that it was written. Not publishing it would be no better — in fact, it would be worse — than not having written it at all.
Because it would be a secret.
Anything that you do or say or produce and then intentionally hide from people is, by definition, a secret. No big revelation there. Secrets are not, a priori, harmful. It is sometimes necessary to keep secrets, ranging from the mundane (a surprise birthday party) to the romantic (popping the question) to the professional (not telling your boss you’re leaving until you secure a new job). Note, however, that the essence of all of these secrets is that they are short-term. There is a pinpointable moment in time, known in advance, when the secret will be revealed and it will cease being a secret. All secrets are expensive (in money, or resources, or stress), but we trade a little of that in the short term for a better outcome at the moment of revelation.
But secrets that have no sunset clause, no moment of relevation, no pre-definable point that we can nail down and say that after this point they will no longer be secrets — these are the ones that are harmful. The longer the term, the bigger the secret gets, the more expensive it becomes, and the bigger the harm you do to yourself and everyone around you as you spend more of your own resources trying to protect the secret and create a larger and larger web of lies in doing so. You don’t think it will happen, but it always does; it just creeps up on you. It starts small (it always does): a phone call you claim was a wrong number but you erase the caller ID record; a letter you claim is junk mail but later fish out of the trash and hide. A secret meeting, and therefore a period of time for which you can’t account for your whereabouts; a drawer that no one can open; a closet that no one can see. Computer passwords not shared; hidden folders; secret partitions; remote storage accounts with encrypted archives. Puzzled questions; obvious lies; confrontations. Let me know when this starts to sound familiar.
The addicted life is full of secrets. Who knows what, and how much, of which story (which lie). The lies build up, cross and intersect, weave an entire tapestry of bullshit that gets between you and everyone else, no matter how close, no matter how loved. I actually developed entirely new addictions to hide other addictions that I felt specific people would disapprove of. And what brought me down, finally, eventually, utterly, was not the physical exhaustion, not the money, not any of the usual effects you associate with drugs or alcohol, but the sheer expense of keeping track of all my intersecting secrets.
So I got sober. It was not easy, and it was not fun, and I do not recommend my methods to anyone, but they worked for me and they continue to work now, almost two years later. And one of the things that I promised myself after I got sober and stayed sober was that, not only would I someday die sober, but that I would die without any secrets. And I’m a long way from that still, but I’m getting there, and I’ll be damned if I’m going to start making new secrets now out of my no-longer-addicted life.
(Having this particular life goal is admittedly limiting in some ways. I will not become a lawyer, or a CIA operative, or even get a security clearance to do contract work for the government. I will not be doing anything that requires taking secrets “to the grave”. This is not to say that I can’t keep secrets — in fact, I keep them very well (practice makes perfect). For instance, my last job required me to work with real people’s personal information (social security number, birthdate, address… pretty much everything you’d need to perpetrate an identify theft). It’s obviously extremely important that that information be kept secret, but that was never a problem for me. I never kept any of the data on my own computer, never wrote them down, and therefore no longer have access to them. In fact, having a personal life goal of not keeping secrets actually helps me keep professional secrets better, because I make sure that they stay short-term and that I don’t do anything that could cause them to become long-term secrets.)
Some people, in their post-traumatic critiques, suggested writing such a sensitive piece but only showing it privately to friends and family. This belies a complete lack of understanding about the underlying issues. Sharing it with only a few people would, in many ways, be worse than sharing it with no one at all. Keeping track of who knew, who was on the inside, whether they could be trusted, whether the circle of people who knew would grow larger, whether it would grow out of control, whether the Wrong Person would discover it or overhear it or figure it out or find it on a computer or on a backup disk or on a hidden partition or on a copy that had been printed out and stuffed in the bottom of a drawer somewhere. It would have felt just like old times… and I’m not particularly nostalgic about those times.
And now, if you’ll excuse me, I have to go to the bathroom.
