In Toni Morrison’s Pulitzer Prize-winning novel, Beloved, a white woman named Amy finds a black woman in the woods about to give birth. Sethe, a runaway slave on her way to Ohio, is not sure at first whether to trust her.
 
Certainly Amy shares her culture's view that Sethe, as a black woman, is inferior to her in intelligence. But the kindness in Amy overrules all else and instead of doing what the law requires—turn her in—she lifts up Sethe's swollen feet and begins to tenderly massage them. Sethe begins to cry.
 
“It’s gonna hurt, now,” said Amy. “Anything dead coming back to life hurts.”
 
“A truth for all times,” the story’s narrator observes.

Click here to see a humorous excerpt from the classic TV show I’ve Got a Secret. Guests on the show would come on stage and whisper their secret into Garry’s ear. (The secret was then revealed to the audience.) The panelists would ask questions to try to uncover the secret. It was always great fun when the secret was revealed to the panel—whether it was shocking or unusual or simply unexpected. Good energy is released when a secret becomes known.

In Frank Delaney’s epic novel about Ireland, the narrator tells us that every person has three dimensions to his/her life:

1. The public life,
2. The private life, and
3. The secret life.

The story Delaney weaves aptly demonstrates that the untold secrets we hold inside ourselves play out in our actions in unpredictable ways. We are the only ones we are really hiding our secrets from. Everyone else already “knows.” Or at the very least, they “know” that we are hiding something.