Display a scar like a badge; bury a corpse in a hush. I first thought this was a contradiction. In many minds, to survive an emotionally or physically arduous ordeal is cause for pride, yet suicide, barring heroic self-sacrifice, is cause for shame. Still, my sense of contradiction came from the lack of neutral ground. Courage and cowardice are like that. There are only right and wrong moves when faced with saving an infant before fleeing a burning building.
Most of us online don't face such dramatic choices in our lives, ones that will define us in all touched memories until those involved are dead. We have to define ourselves brick by brick, constructing "I" over decades in a world that faintly, almost inoffensively, emits that moldy odor of monotony. If not from surgery or accident, most of our scars are on the inside.
This year, I'm turning them out.
I can't tell you exactly what will tumble into Steemit. My thoughts and dreams intimate surrealism, erotica, horror, and honey. I'm advised to post a photograph of myself holding a piece of paper with the date and the word "Steemit." I'm not going to do that. I'm not going to give my name, either.
What I will do is provide raw honesty in the form of fictional writing.
These might seem like true contradictions. But it's difficult to be completely honest when you're being watched. This is the value of privacy, even for those with nothing to hide. Anonymity is a grand road to sincerity. As to "fictional": letting my mind run fully rampant in prose with pure fantasies and nightmares is more deeply revealing than telling you what happened today.
Let's start by naming me "Calanthe," because I like it. I dislike "Megan." You see that the former, however obscure and grandiose, is more honest than the latter, because it better represents my silly mind, and neither are my given name.
Hello, I'm Calanthe! Ask me anything a uniform wouldn't.