Shake it Out

To anyone who thinks I am being cute with the title of this post, I'm not. Yes I have P, I get it. This is as serious as a heart attack.

Regrets collect like old friends
Here to relive your darkest moments

"I can't really overstate what a huge step it is for me to open up about this stuff knowing that eventually people will link it to me. But at the end of the day, openness is my nature. The secret wears on me, and it pains me more and more to not level with the people around me. I'm not ready to go public yet, but I'm OK with where this blog inevitably leads. I'm not afraid anymore.

Here's where everything comes together
Either that or it all falls apart
Yeah, here's where the strings come in"

I wrote those words more than a year ago in a post entitled Here's Where the Strings Come In. I can tell you the person who wrote them was in some major turmoil. No one has ever asked me which is my favorite blog post, but it's hands down that one. Favorite isn't the right word, but I'm prouder of that than anything I've ever written. I literally can't read it without being overwhelmed by emotion.

Many of you may have noticed me playing with my pseudonymity of late, offering to depseud to anyone who ponied up $250 for my Parkinson's Unity walk. I'll admit it was a coy marketing move, and although I have every intention of still honoring any takers, I want my readers to appreciate how far I've come to be able to do that. It's all part of a willful effort on my part to continue loosening my grip on the secret that weighed me down for so long.

It's no coincidence then that I pushed myself to do something relatively dramatic over the weekend. I came out to most of my Facebook friends as the author of this. I felt very comfortable doing this because Facebook is of course a stalwart and eminently trustworthy guardian of our privacy.

hahahahaha! .... haha... ha <wipes a tear>

No seriously, that was the point. It was like a child releasing a balloon to wherever it may float. With that I am done coming out and I am putting to rest a dark, lonely and paranoid episode of my life. I intend to maintain this alter ego as a tool to make a difference in people's lives. I've learned a tremendous amount about the power of multiple pseudonymous identities in social media, much of it from someone I consider a hero, blogger @drisis. And I will continue to use my story in my personal interactions as a way to show that we all have our crosses to bear, some of them in silence. You never now what someone is going through, so please be kind to one another. At the end of the day that's really all we have to define us as humans.

I'm always dragging that horse around
All of his questions, such a mournful sound
Tonight I'm gonna bury that horse in the ground

Shake it out