“I cheat on my wife with men”
If you want to see what we really are, all we need are masks.
We protect our deepest self from those closest to us, but why?
Do we all live in fear that our closest held secrets may be incongruent with the avatar we’ve concieved and sold to the world,?
Do we fear that when the world discovers our secrets we’ll be jettisoned from our narrative into a world we’ve tried to run away from?
What would I do
if I knew what you were hiding?
How would I feel if I found out it was the same as me?
What if deep down, the pain that I bury, is actually what makes us the same?
Confessionals (2022), The changing rooms of a retail store are converted into a confession booth. Participants enter one at a time and write secrets and lies on the walls.
I love to watch, I’m always involved to a certain degree and I often think about the nature of my fingerprints being all over them, but everyone understands I’m just the voyeur. It’s most intimate when it’s just one person, the game can be a little intense for some individuals, but overall it’s the simplest way to play. When they leave there are tears, knowing nods and little gestures of kindness closing our small moment of connection. Some run, some hide, but they all leave a trail behind them, most find it hard to clean up the energy after being so vulnerable.
The silent exchanges are imprinted on my mind, to see a soul that’s just opened is one of life’s rarest gifts and I will forever be grateful for those that showed me their’s. It’s a clean, deep connection, a neat closure of an experience from one soul to another. But, when it’s a group, that’s when it gets messy.
The anxiety and relationships of power quickly invade the experience, it’s fun to sit in that wonderful anxious energy of the group, or if you want to get particularly dirty a couple. They never realise that the game begins before they’ve entered the room. When you learn the sounds and scents of deceit it can be a little intoxicating, and the smell starts as soon as one of them realises what is happening. With deceit in couples it’s always winner takes all, and there is always someone in the team that has a deeper secret to hide.
You can feel it on them, they approach the game like a trap, pawing around it to see how it works, more often than not they’re carnivorous, pupils dilated they know there is a prize in the trap, but there’s a cost to retrieve it… It’s the experienced ones that are the prize players, refined in their approach, calculated. Their positioning and ability to move their partner across the room the first secret we share together. Sometimes they admit what they’re doing, the eyes never lie. It feels exactly like what it is, infidelity. The irony is that as one partner is sent into the room with a ‘Why don’t you take a look’ to ‘Check and see what it’s like’, the other is telling me that the experience is for them, ready to release the baggage but not for it to affect them.
I watch without judgement, only admiration. The walls confirm the assumptions: infidelity, desire betrayal. There’s no explanation or justification besides power, and it’s ability to corrupt. Even within our small worlds and our intimate relationships, we hide and fake our way through it. For some of us, we’ve made a world where we thought we were free, the powers we held let us go out into the world and do things we wouldn’t ordinarily do. And for some of us, those little adventures came with wounds and scars that weigh heavy over time.
And when we come back from our secret worlds with our scars and secrets in tow, how do we reconcile the difference? What if we liked it on the other side? How do we know which us is us? aren’t they all…