A Very Public Un-Doing

What is the point of it? Dredging up ghosts, hanging them on the line in public - what possible purpose does it serve? To be honest, I didn't intend to go this far, to a place that stops feeling brave and twists into something less palatable, a peep show of misery that most people would store firmly behind closed doors. So why? I could stop this now and all it would be are a collection of titillating tidbits, fodder for gossip and speculation I would leave behind as a sign to people who know nothing about me that I was nothing more than a series of mistakes, bad judgement and perhaps, rotten luck. Of  course that is not the sum of my life. But if I'm not willing to be unflinchingly honest - if I can't describe how someone who seemingly had so many advantages, a good job she was lucky to have, people who loved and supported her - could land in this place now, then there really is no point. I am more than a label, a textbook definition of an illness, a case study of characteristics that are easily dismissed. On some level I am compelled to explain there were reasons why this transpired. Self-indulgence? Pity? I could spare you the gory details and take them with me when I go - spare my family from revelations that cause them pain - and perhaps you think I should. I could tell you to look away - stop reading these words - this uncomfortable unburdening that takes me places I too would prefer to leave behind. But that is the point, they never did go away and the more I tried to keep them in the more they literally ate me alive. I need to write because it is the only way for me to control the story, to say there was more to this than this flawed surface might suggest. I write to let the ghosts go...