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Speaker 1: Hey, Family Secrets. Family, it's been a minute. The last

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Speaker 1: episode of the ninth season, dropped way back on January eleventh,

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Speaker 1: was Alice Carrier's extraordinary story of growing up with her

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Speaker 1: mercurial mother, the famous painter Jennifer Bartlett. Last season was

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Speaker 1: my favorite season yet. I keep saying that each season

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Speaker 1: because it's true. The stories keep coming, each one as

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Speaker 1: individual as a snowflake. When it comes to family secrets,

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Speaker 1: every secret is unique and powerful in its own way,

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Speaker 1: and reckoning with those secrets is nothing short of liberating.

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Speaker 1: I've seen it again and again in my guest's lives

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Speaker 1: as well as in my own. Currently, we're hard at

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Speaker 1: work on the tenth season of this podcast, which will

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Speaker 1: drop in early June. We have an array of fantastic

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Speaker 1: guests lined up, and I've been inspired and provoked by

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Speaker 1: the conversations I've had thus far. Some of you may

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Speaker 1: have noticed that we haven't been dropping in our usual

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Speaker 1: bonus content, like conversations with great minds about prior episodes

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Speaker 1: of the pod, and there's a reason for that. One

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Speaker 1: of my favorite writers, Joan Didion, once wrote that life

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Speaker 1: changes fast. Life changes in an instant, the ordinary instant

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Speaker 1: in my life. That fast change came on an ordinary

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Speaker 1: day in the form of a frightening diagnosis. On January fifteenth,

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Speaker 1: just a few days after the last season of Family

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Speaker 1: Secrets ended, I learned that I had a rare cancer

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Speaker 1: in the back of my eye. It's hard for me

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Speaker 1: to even say these words. Only six in a million

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Speaker 1: people are diagnosed with this particular form of cancer. As

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Speaker 1: the days turned into a blur of doctors, hospitals, new words,

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Speaker 1: new terms, surgery and treat meant, I learned that I

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Speaker 1: was very lucky it had been caught early because it

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Speaker 1: was affecting my vision, something that doesn't always happen, and

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Speaker 1: so it was treatable. And the odds are tremendously in

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Speaker 1: my favor that I'm now on the other side of it,

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Speaker 1: and that it will have been a big old speed bump,

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Speaker 1: a chapter, a brief and brutal but ultimately survivable scare.

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Speaker 1: Why am I sharing this with you because my first instinct,

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Speaker 1: which lasted for over a month, was to tell almost

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Speaker 1: no one. My immediate family knew and my innermost circle

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Speaker 1: of friends. But I was hell bent on keeping this private.

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Speaker 1: I didn't think of it as keeping a secret. I

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Speaker 1: figured that Eventually I might write about it, as I

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Speaker 1: have written about so many other chapters in my life,

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Speaker 1: in the fullness of time. But while I was going

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Speaker 1: through it, I felt too vulnerable. I thought a lot

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Speaker 1: of about an episode I recorded last season titled Shanda,

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Speaker 1: in which the writer Letty Cotton Pogribin talked about a

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Speaker 1: benign brain condition that she kept secret for a long

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Speaker 1: time because she was worried that if people knew, they

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Speaker 1: would see her differently. They would see her as a

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Speaker 1: sick person, someone with something wrong with her, separate from

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Speaker 1: the herd of the healthy. It felt as Letty and

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Speaker 1: I discussed that illness is somehow a source of shame,

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Speaker 1: and as all of you Family Secrets listeners know, shame

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Speaker 1: leads to secrecy, and secrecy leads to toxicity and isolation,

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Speaker 1: and around and around we go. So I did something

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Speaker 1: that was hard and scary for me. I announced to

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Speaker 1: my diagnosis on social media, specifically on my public Instagram account,

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Speaker 1: so that I could own my truth rather than falling

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Speaker 1: victim to it. And in the flood of loving, kind,

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Speaker 1: compassion responses I received from friends, acquaintances, strangers, readers, listeners

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Speaker 1: of this podcast, I was reminded of something that I know,

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Speaker 1: but I had forgotten in the midst of my own

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Speaker 1: terror and reflexive self protection. I had forgotten that we

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Speaker 1: need one another, that we are part of a vast

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Speaker 1: tapestry a community, and that most of us are at

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Speaker 1: our corese kind and caring. And so I've been through

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Speaker 1: some hard things in the last bunch of weeks, but

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Speaker 1: I went through them with a sense of being carried,

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Speaker 1: being borne by so many humans who sent me their

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Speaker 1: good wishes in whatever ways they could. This has meant

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Speaker 1: the world, it continues to me in the world. There's

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Speaker 1: a profound difference between privacy and secrecy. I still feel

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Speaker 1: very much like a private person, even though I live

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Speaker 1: a somewhat public life. So when I realized that I

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Speaker 1: was harboring a secret, that I wasn't allowing people in,

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Speaker 1: that I wasn't allowing people to be their best selves

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Speaker 1: and to carry me through this time, I knew I

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Speaker 1: had to do it differently. And so, dear dear family,

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Speaker 1: secrets family, this is just me saying to you, I

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Speaker 1: love this community. I love the work I've been called

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Speaker 1: to do in life that so often involves breaking down

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Speaker 1: my own fears as a way of coming to a

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Speaker 1: deeper understanding. I really am going to be okay. Please

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Speaker 1: know that, And if you'd like to follow along between

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Speaker 1: now and June when the new season drops, come on

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Speaker 1: over to Instagram and say Hi, I'm at Danny writer.

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Speaker 1: That's da Ni writer. I even post cute puppy photos sometimes,

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Speaker 1: but I'm over there as I am over here trying

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Speaker 1: to make sense of what it is to be human.

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Speaker 1: Thanks for listening.