This week I talked with Scott Stirrett, an entrepreneur who spent years managing what people thought of him, and Ranae Van Roekel, who carried a secret for thirty years because someone once told her to.
This week, both conversations really made me think about what hiding costs us.
Scott built a version of himself that was careful and closeted and quietly perfect, because he was scared of what people would think if they saw the real one. He told me once he came out, the future he'd been dreading his whole life never actually showed up.
Ranae was handed a secret as a kid and told never to speak of it again, and that one instruction became the blueprint for decades of choices that weren't really hers to make.
I keep thinking about how much of a life can get built around protecting an image, and how much of that life only starts once you put the image down.
"Today you have two choices."
If something in that landed, here's where to go:
SCOTT STIRRETT
on unlearning the fear of being anything less than perfect
RANAE VAN ROEKEL
on what it costs to carry a secret, and what it finally took to put it down
Until next time, Matt
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