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The Confessions of Wounds

Although a journal is mostly for private consumption, it will fall predictably into other hands. Behind the mask of privacy lurks an exhibitionist. Because the log is a depository of secrets, there is a good chance they’ll be divulged. A secretary was originally a piece of furniture made of wood, a writing desk with locked drawers designed to shelter the private correspondence of government officials or the intimate letters of aristocratic women. The confidante who managed such a precious piece of furniture, the keeper of the keys to drawers, was called a secretaire, the guardian of the secrets. But as etymology reveals, the word secret derives from the Latin word secretus, meaning “separate, hidden,” and the French word secreter, which has given the English words “to secrete” and “secretion,” means “to discharge, to seep, to excrete what is hidden.” Thus, a secret is meant to be discharged, released. There’s an uncanny paradox embedded in that word. Every diary is a prolonged confession to be leaked.