Last night, I was at a Thanksgiving dinner and someone said they had been reading my blog and were surprised at my openness about sharing parts of my life. I was asked if I ever regretted it.  I am often asked that question and have been thinking about what openness is, why it is so threatening to so many people, what it really means,  and why it has become important to me.

As is perhaps obvious, I do not regret it. Ever. Not even when strangers many thousands of miles send me rude messages or try to tell me what to do.

I said I was perhaps not as open as people think – I share some parts of my life, not others. I believe it takes a great deal of courage and strength to share my dreams and hopes and failures with anyone else. I have written several memoirs in book form, and no one ever asked me why I was being open.

If people read my blog as a literary memoir, they would expect me to be open and authentic about my life,  and perhaps even praise me for it. That is just what they are paying for when they buy memoirs, what critics expect. The fact that I am open about my life on a blog is what puzzles some people, and disturbs some others.

It makes a lot of people uncomfortable when people decide to be honest about themselves.

In the changing landscape of the writer’s life – everything is different now than it was a few years ago – I have come to see my blog as a living memoir, as my great work, for better or worse. What possible value would it be to people if I were not open, and what real reason would people have to read it, if they did not see their lives – the good and the bad – reflected in it? Truly, my failures are more interesting than my successes, we can all learn from them.

I think if the blog were published between the pages of a book (this can no longer happen in our world) no one would even ask about openness or think it strange. Openness is the currency of good writing.

In Letters to a Young Poet, Raine Maria Rilke wrote that “only someone who is ready for everything, who doesn’t exclude any experience, even the most incomprehensible, will live the relationship with another person as something alive and will himself sound the depths of his own being.”

“Make your ego porous,” Rilke wrote. “Will is of little importance, complaining is nothing, fame is nothing. Openness, patience, receptivity, solitude is everything.” The question I would pose to other writers and artists is this: why aren’t you open? Why are you hiding yourself and  your life and your work from the people you ask to pay for your life and support it? To me, the opposite of openness is a kind of fraud, an unconscious deception, I think it the right of people to decide for themselves, but I don’t see all that much noble in hiding. If you expect people to pay to read about your life, you owe them a fulll accounting of it, as best you can provide.

In many parts of my life, I see that openness is threatening to people. The people who run the carriage trade in New York are almost continuously uncomfortable with me – I have always made them uneasy – because they keep so much of what they do a secret, they do not believe in being transparent. Neither do the people in animal rights groups, or the mayor’s office, or in the City Council. If anyone was truly open, they would be exposing their tender underbellies to wolves. No corporation in American is truly open, no stockholder would tolerate it.

The established order – political, business, cultural, media –  is not an open culture, only crazy writers, artists and lunatics would ever do it. I was at a dinner party last week – people were talking football and local politics – and some asked me not to share it on my blog. I was astonished at the idea that I would take a private dinner conversation – not the most exhilarating one – and put it on my blog without permission or discussion. For one thing, I would never do that, for another, why would I want to?

I said I was surprised by the question, and my host said, almost wrinkling her nose, “well, you are so open about your life.”

I can’t speak for anyone else, but there is great value to me in openness. For one thing, it is liberating. I have no secrets. My many shortcomings are as obvious as my few gifts, I have nothing to hide, there is (almost)  nothing you can find out about me that I haven’t told you. That is a very good thing to feel.

For another, and as Rilki wrote, openness has made my ego porous. All the things I hid for much of my life – my anxiety, addictions, obsessions, depressions, horrific mistakes and compulsions – are not important. I have acknowledged them, written about them, dealt with them and still do. Openness, patience, solitude and receptivity is everything. These are the foundation elements of creativity.

Being open has made me more creative. You cannot truly ever be creative, I believe if you do not know yourself and take responsibility for yourself. What is art, after all, but the sharing of experience? And no one on this world has only had perfect and joyous experience.

Through openness I have come to see myself clearly, face the truth about me, try to learn and improve, understand my passions and strength, find love and begin to learn to like myself. That cannot help but be reflected in one’s work. And I am told quite often that the more open I have become, the better my writing is.

We live in a hiding culture. In the Fear Nation, it is quite literally considered dangerous, even suicidal, to be honest. We are all imperfect human beings, but it has become a heresy to acknowledge it – just look at the painful posturing and marketing – and lying –  our politicians must do. Think what might be if politicians could be open about their lives: the journalists and rivals would have nothing to talk about but the issues that matter.

People tell me every day why they are afraid to be open: what their families and mothers and fathers will think, what their bosses will think, what their neighbors and friends and children will think, how unnerved they would be. They are too busy, too important, too distracted. Too frightened. Everyone must make their own decisions about openness, I am not here to tell anyone what to do. But this is what I am thinking: nuts to them.

I can say that being open has been one of the most liberating, creative and authentic experiences of my life, for all the pain, discomfort and unease it often causes. It is the most healing thing I have ever done.  I did not set out to be open as a way of doing good, but I have learned that being open is the most helpful thing I ever do in my writing life. People can look at me and see themselves in the mirror, in good and bad ways.

Every day someone tells me they read my writing even though they sometimes – or very often – disagree with me. I always think the same thing: why would anyone read anyone else they always agree with? What would be the point?

Openness has taken me past that fear of upsetting people, or having people disagree with me, it has stopped me from diminishing my own work and making it less valuable. I don’t care what members of my family think, they can tell their own stories if they wish.  Openness it is the thing that gives others a measure of their own lives as well as my life. They can take what they want and leave what they don’t like behind. That is no problem for me.

Beavis & Butthead, two of my creative inspirations, said repeatedly that because they were stupid, they were free.

I have come to see that because i am open, I am free to be me.