The version of me you have never met

You can know someone for years and never once see what it is actually like to be them. You get the calm surface. You never see who they really are underneath, working hard to keep that surface calm.

These pages are my attempt to let you see the real version of me, the one I have spent most of my life making sure nobody met.

If you can spare ten or twenty minutes, here is what I can promise you in return: you will come away knowing me, the real me, the part I keep hidden, in a way that years of the easy surface never could.

Most of what is here is the kind of thing people carry quietly their whole lives, and it may well be some of the most vulnerable writing you will ever receive from a friend. Writing it down frightened me; leaving it somewhere you could read it frightens me more. I am doing it anyway, because I would rather be truly known than uncomfortably hidden.

I won't give it away in advance. Some of it will surprise you, and some of it goes further down than I usually let anyone see, even myself.

You almost certainly have met the simpler version of me, and there is a fair chance I sent you here myself. If a friend passed this on and we have never actually met, you are every bit as welcome.