<blockquote>I still hide, I suppose. Who wouldn’t? When you learn from an early age, from first schooling, that whatever you have inside you, isn’t quite right. That you’ll never fit in entirely. You’ll never cut straight with scissors or learn to play tether ball with the other kids. Even, years later, when none of this is true, it rings true, like the church bell tolling out through bright, clean air. Hide yourself from God, from your neighbor, from everyone. And perhaps it’s true, which I’m just now discovering, even as I write this essay, that shame is the entity around which my internal self has been constructed, inexorably linked, as two trees grown together.

I would like to hide, even now, in this essay. To be coy, to play, less than fast and loose with the facts than to obscure them, to obfuscate.</blockquote>