To know your mind speak it.

I was raised never to discuss oneself. Worse than rude, it denoted pride, vanity, self-regard. In polite company you asked after your interlocutor or, better yet, gabbed desultorily about topics of scant interest to either. (Politics and religion were expressly forbidden.) My parents practiced what they preached. I recall no stories about their lives except hints in passing: not one. Expression of emotion was likewise taboo. The beau ideal of my rearing was a well-mannered mannequin, cheerful with pleasant patter that satisfied nothing more than a desire to ingratiate.

I believed so firmly in this code that self-disclosure seemed, initially, deplorably daring. Personal confusion was to be kept private! I can’t recall ever seeking advice from either parent. I did what I was told – it wasn’t hard – and disobeyed in delicious secret. With my bedroom door shut any violation was permissible because none ever occurred. We were only as we appeared.

The moral, emotional, and intellectual deficiencies of such an approach seem so blatant one wonders how – or why – sanity could have enacted it. My parents, though, were neither crazy nor exceptionally cruel. They raised their kids comme il faut. Today’s fixation with effective parenting would have struck them as bizarre. Even the verb – to “parent”– would have puzzled them. Everyone knew how to raise a kid – as your parents had – case closed.

Ever talkative, I got good at talking about nothing. This social skill has stood me in good stead: I can launch a conversation with almost anybody about almost anything, as you may have noticed. Once started, I’m hard to stop. My self-imposed limit of six hundred words for these daily dalliances is a mercy to us both.

Not surprisingly, when anguish required articulation, I turned to poetry to sort out my soul. I knew nothing about poetry, didn’t like or read it much, but after my dad died when I was sixteen, I sensed poetry’s peculiar utility as a medium for confession. A poet is shaping a pretty object as a potter shapes a pot: the demands of the form dictate the design, making the craft impersonal. A prose confession is about you; the poet can hide behind his art. I’m guessing I learned this from Shakespeare. Is Hamlet about its maker? Are his searingly candid sonnets confessions? Yes, no, maybe, we will ever know.

Poems wrangled my anguish in public, my secret journals in private. My nakedness in those early journals made me blush; I locked them away to avoid detection. The Carll they depict was, if not a monster, monstrously different from the Carll my parents had in mind. My published utterances – for I was “a writer” now – differed as drastically from my private as Dr. Jekyll from Mr. Hyde – or so I believed.

My two warring selves – public and private – battled it out throughout my career, hissing at each other, decrying each other’s surrenders and evasions. Their combat educated me, as I pacified, negotiated. When I married Jane and then retired, I at last became one. The private Carll now differs little from the guy you’ve met.

Only by speaking my mind did I get to know it. I wrote to explore, not extol myself. In my voluminous spew there is much lamentation, little laudation; plenty bathetic, pretty much nothing boastful. Saying what I saw taught me to see. I know no other way.

My parents taught me to talk, bless them. Regarding what to talk about they were absurdly wrong. To know your mind, you must speak it. Only you can teach yourself who you are.