Anonymous

Sometime, I wish I could just be anonymous. Like on this blog. I think I’d be more likely to write if my name and face were not attached to it.

But then, that’s not what I want. As is usually the case with human beings (in my fairly limited experience), there is a competing desire. Really, I long to be known. Fully, deeply known. I long to be unself-conscious, spontaneous, and unashamed. I’d like to believe this is even possible for me. It’s not necessarily fame and spotlight — I know for certain I don’t want that. But, it is also not anonymity.

The problem is that both knowing fully and being fully known require honesty and risk. Most of the time (as in pretty much all the time) I’m just too scared for those things. So I choose anononymous. Writers, Anonymous. Introverts, Anonymous. Academic Advisors, Anonymous. Hannah, Anonymous.

Writing fiction has seemed like a great way to accomplish this cowardly anti-goal. What better way to hide than to live among imaginary, made up people, in a world that I believed no one but me would ever touch? It was deeper than escape, but not quite freedom — some kind of illicit affair behind the bars of a jail cell. Experiencing Life, Anonymous.

This is why it took me a year to even confess to anyone that I do write. Because then people wanted to know what I was writing about. They wanted to read it. They wanted me to make them a character in it. They want to know if I was going to be PUBLISHED.

The publishing question is always the most popular one, and it is the one I haven’t had a real answer for in my heart. I have hidden behind the excuses that it is hard, there’s so much to it, the chances of it actually happening are so small… all excuses without strong verbs. I’ve hidden behind “It’s not really up to me” when the truth is, I’m still not 100% sure I even want to try.

Publishing, Anonymous. It doesn’t work. The very act of trying to be published is staking a claim for my own work, for myself. It’s a bold statement that I have something worth saying, some story that is worth knowing. It is an effort to open up the place where I have hidden to other people. Choosing to even investigate the faint hope that I might one day be published is choosing the desire to be known over the desire to be anonymous. It is doing battle against a part of myself. And some days, I’m still not 100% sure I even want to try. I think perhaps the day I send my manuscript to an editor will be the day I truly decide what my greater desire is, and if being known is really worth the risk.