If you checked this page within the last forty minutes, you read an article that is now not here. My husband read it, I felt embarrassed, and in haste I deleted it. I deleted it from here, Facebook, and Twitter. I didn’t want you to read it and think that I should be ashamed of myself. It’s as gone as these online things can be, but the embarrassment is still here.

I read recently that Ted Hughes burned one of Sylvia Plath’s journals after her death. He said, “I destroyed it because I did not want her children to have to read it (in those days I regarded forgetfulness as an essential part of survival).” He was ashamed of what she wrote.

I once forced my husband to cut a piece out of a video project he had made about memory. He had used part of a home video of me sitting in our honeymoon suite the morning after our wedding talking to my mother while he recorded all of the little details in the room—our muddy shoes, my bobby pins, the view out the window of a Midwestern town’s rainy skyline. There was one detail, though, that I did not want revealed. Secret Twenty, Revealed. I padded my wedding bra. I thought people would think I padded my bra regularly. I had a full C-cup by the age of twelve and kids teased me that I stuffed my bra. The only time I’ve ever padded my bra was to hold up a fifty-pound strapless wedding dress in the rain. I just needed a little help, and him letting other people know that was not okay with me. I told him to cut it, and he felt ashamed for having used it in the first place. I’ve always regretted making him do that.

Like I regret the piece that was deleted. Like he would regret saying anything to me about it if he knew how ashamed I now feel. I wish I could get that piece back, but even if I did I couldn’t re-post it because now there is embarrassment where there once was none. I don’t think that forgetfulness is an essential part of survival. I think sharing is but with sharing comes all of these other risks of shame, embarrassment, fear, regret, vulnerability, humiliation. I think I would have preferred you to think badly of me than not to have tried saying anything at all, but it’s a constant struggle.