What Was Kept From You
from Human Meme
There was a moment in your life when you found out. Maybe you were eleven, and a cousin let something slip at a family dinner. Perhaps it happened at thirty-four, going through a parent's papers after a funeral, when a folder you were not supposed to open contained a name you had never heard. Or you were fifty-eight, and a half-sister you did not know you had appeared in your DNA results. The detail varies from one person to the next. What stays constant is the texture of the moment. The room reorganizes itself. Around it, the faces of the people who had known reorganize along with the room. And then the realization arrives, that the world you had been living in was a smaller version of the world, edited for you, by people who had decided what you could be told and when. I want to talk right now about what it means to sit on the receiving end of a structural decision someone else has made about your knowledge. The decisions where a person, or a committee, or an institution, looks at another human being and decides that the truth would not serve them. That the truth will be administered later, in doses, on a schedule the person being administered to did not consent to and cannot see.
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