My life philosophy in one sentence: keep your secrets, and you’ll have a future.
HAHA. Just a joke. Please do not hire me as a spy.
Okay, let me do this properly. Here are the versions I considered:
- Keep your secrets and you’ll have a future. (The dramatic one. Works best whispered.)
- Never trust a sandwich in a railway station. (The practical one.)
- Tell the truth, but tell it funny. (The honest one.)
- Everything embarrassing is material. (The writer’s one.)
I picked the first because it makes people laugh nervously. But I’ll let you in on a secret about secrets: they are the only thing that gets more interesting the longer you keep them. A secret hidden in a drawer is a story waiting for its moment. And the day it finally walks out, in the right words, in the right order, it stops being a secret and becomes literature.
The Roman emperor Marcus Aurelius wrote private notes to himself that were never meant for readers (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Meditations). Almost two thousand years later, we’re still reading them. That’s the strangest kind of future: the one you built by writing for yourself.
This is the thread running through my book, Anti-Memoirs of a Muse. It’s a memoir that refuses to behave: some things stay hidden, some things get told sideways, and the muse is not always who you think. If you like stories that wink at you, here’s where to find it.
Now your turn. What’s your life philosophy in one sentence? The funnier, the better. Tell me in the comments.
Follow along:
Julia Kalman
Editor at NLS | Writer & Editor
Medium | Website | Books (Amazon) | Goodreads | Facebook | X (Twitter)
Leave a Reply