I was tentative at first, hid myself behind veils and a false name. Over time, the veils slipped away, I walked out from behind the curtain, showed my face to the light, revealed my name and purpose. And being seen is ok. It's good. I want people to know me for who I am, for who I was, to keep the secrets from defining me.

Because the secrets don't define me. Even better, after seeing the light of day, after being transformed into stories, they have become almost irrelevant, forming and transforming experiences, important ones, but not the core of who I am.

Visitors to this Web page, however, may have a different impression. In the interest of shaping writing to survive to better reflect reality and also to bring a more professional feel to the page, I have made a few changes. They're subtle — a new tag line, slightly different selections in Excerpts from Life, a more complete look to the food writing page, which I've renamed Kitchen Detour. Most of the old stuff is still here, stories of angst, secrets revealed, but you have to dig a little deeper to find it.

Next post: Crumbling beneath the Formstone. Or something along those lines, with a departure from post titles derived from pop music.

(Image: Mirror, Little House by Jennifer Trinkle, 1986.)

Tags: blogging, self-promotion, secrets, anonymity, emotional striptease

In the beginning, there was Anonmomous.

Then it was simply Jennifer. But there were slip-ups. The PublicLiterature.Org stories with my full name. The e-mails I sent to others from my personal gmail account. The few blogging awards that went to Jennifer Fullname instead of to just Jennifer.

My father found the blog. I accidentally sent an e-mail to my ex-husband from the writing to survive account and I'm pretty sure he's been here. I have a sneaking suspicion that my brother-in-law has visited at least once. A friend from elementary school found me here. For a while the first hit on a Google search of my name (yeah, I google my own name. I'm not the only one, right?) was the blog, for reasons that are somewhat mysterious. Until today, the two weren't directly connected.

It's one thing to write to complete strangers. It's quite another to realize that people who may be a part of my story are reading. Or that casual friends might come upon this and find out more than they ever wanted to know about me. But as I kept on leaving the door ajar, I realized that I want to be open, needed it. What's there to hide? Just me.

So.



Here I am.

Jennifer Trinkle.

All other names have been changed to protect the innocent. In most cases.

Tags: openness, anonymity, secrets