Three Different Lives?

Mar 28, 2025

Everyone has three lives: a public life, a private life, and a secret life.

The statement is attributed to the celebrated Colombian novelist, also according to many, the inventor and master of “magical realism”, and the Nobel Laureate, Gabriel García Márquez. I’m sure many of you have read his most cherished novel, “One Hundred Years of Solitude”, along with his other widely-read book, “Love in the Time of Cholera”. I much prefer the first to the second, and I just recently listened to it as an audiobook for the first time, after having last read it for the second time over twenty years ago. The surreal and historical travails of the Buendia family throughout their challenging, unpredictable, and war-plagued Colombian century continue to hypnotize and delight most international readers of literary fiction. Myself included.

But what about Marquez’ comment, his idea, that we each have three separate lives?

I highly doubt that most of us humans are aware of these three specifically-articulated, different lives: public, private, and secret. I think it’s primarily because only a certain kind of person is sensitive and self-knowledgeable enough to perceive the differences between them. I would think that artists, therapists, writers, and of course, other self-reflective types, would be keenly aware of these three levels of the human psyche, persona, and spirit.

Me? Yes, for sure. In fact, in my own life, these three separate lives within me are as clear as crystal mountain water. Although perhaps not as fresh, simple, and pure.

I’ve been performing in public for more than half a century, since I was 22 years old. First as a modern dancer, then as a professional clown, then as a solo performer. Along the way, I made a feature-length, autobiographical documentary film (“The Poet and the Con”) about my relationship with my criminal uncle, and in my most recent incarnation, I’ve been blogging since the creation of the internet and Substacking since March 2022.

All my work has been autobiographical. The dance-theater pieces I created, the one-man solo performance shows, and now these Substack posts. I taught autobiographical “solo performance” at USC for years, and I tried to give the gift of self-discovery, storytelling, and self-revelation to decades of students. I never studied the things I taught at my university: improvisation, solo performance, storytelling; I just made up techniques and courses from the things I was doing in “the real world”. “Art from the fabric of my life”.

But sometimes I think only a self-centered narcissist could have done this. And sometimes I think I definitely am such a narcissist. Certainly, my wife and sister would tell you I am, along with many of my friends over the years, although one of my oldest and dearest friends, “Dr. Bobbha”, a career psychiatrist, who has known me since childhood and has seen me in all my costumes and creative lives, says,

Sorry, Trules, you’re not cruel enough to be a narcissist.

I’ll go with that.

But certainly, I’m comfortable with my public persona, my “public life”.

The guy who is sort of a brash, loudmouth New Yorker, ready for confrontation and moral outrage at the drop of a hat.

The same guy who writes here on Substack, the “brash, loudmouth (Substacker), ready for moral outrage and confrontation at the drop of a hat”.

If you’ve been reading here for a while, I think you know that guy.

But… believe it or not… this same guy is simultaneously a soft-touch New Yorker with a heart of gold, the generosity of a doting Dad, and a guy who isn’t as strong, loud, or offensive as he first seems.

With that said, I sometimes even wonder why anyone chooses to read my Substack. If it’s always “me, me, me”, why should anyone care? After all, Substack is the #3 “news” site on the web.

Well… there’s the rub.

Every artist picks his own poison, the metier of his or her work and devotion, whether it be music, writing, dance, visual art, filmmaking, you name it. Some never choose to present autobiographical work. Artist-friends have told me so. Instead, they transform their personal experience into “something else” - not monologues, paintings, songs, stories, dances… about themselves, their personal lives (public or private, certainly not secret).

Yet I do. And of course, others too.

Why? Again.

Well, I think that in the very microscopic, closely-observed, and authentically-told personal story, or work of art, lies… the macroscopic… truth. When students (or I, myself) tell stories about such painful, vulnerable, and revealing things as first love, betrayal, addiction, family, fear, loneliness, friendship - readers and audiences - relate. Because… in the honestly-revealed personal, lies the universal. That’s why readers read, why audiences stand up and applaud. They are moved, touched; they relate and identify with the well-told autobiographical revelation.

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What of “the private life”?

Well, that’s generally thought of as having a family, a community, a place of worship, doing and having, specific things that “the public” generally doesn’t know about.

In my case, because I’ve done autobiographical work for almost half a century, I’ve revealed very personal and “private” things about myself to the public. My dance-theater pieces, my one-man shows, my documentary film, my Substacks… all have “dug up the dirt” on my private life… my uncomfortable adolescence, my self-discovery through modern dance, my careers as a clown, poet, university theater professor, writer-storyteller, and more.

I’ve written about my wife and son, first having married at age 54, becoming a first-time father at age 68. At first, my wife was jealous of my laptop. How it stole time from her, even if it was at 6 a.m. every morning for years. Then, I think, she got used it and came to believe that she knew “who I really was”, just by spending so much time with me over our many years together. Watching me and observing me.

She would honestly but hilariously say to me,

I know you a hundred percent.

I’d laugh and say,

No one knows anyone else 100%!

Yet she continued to believe it, that she knew everything about me.

She never read my funny and tormented tales on my laptop - because I don’t actually think she was all that interested. She left me basically alone “doing my thing”, while we’d often sing Sting’s idealistic and impossible song lyrics together,

If you love someone, set them free. Free, free….

Of course, she heeled me in when she had to, trained me to brush my teeth every morning and night, as I’ve said before, convinced me to adopt her Indonesian nephew as our son, strong-armed me into buying a house in Santa Fe, and… I wrote about all this - in my work.

Many of my readers asked me, amazed,

Does your wife read about herself in your blogs and newsletters? My wife would never let me do something like that!

But she did. Luckily for me, it became a non-issue.

And in this way, much of my private life became very public.

Not to mention social media! Facebook, Instagram, Twitter/X, all the online groups, memberships, associations, and follies.

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Recently, however, my son has rebelled. He’s said to me,

I don’t want you writing about me anymore.

And I say, surprised,

C’mon, I’ve never said anything bad or negative about you in anything I’ve ever written. You just don’t like your friends reading and knowing about you.
So what? he says. I want you to stop!
O…kay, I say hesitantly…

Obviously not keeping my promise in these very words.

Moving on…. since I don’t have any other “private life” to talk about - no church, no temple, no Elk’s, Friar’s, or Moose Club, no ceramics club, no gym posse. Oh, wait, yeah, there’s the… Santa Fe Pickleball Club, and… I’ve even ratted them out!

But what about my “secret life”. Your secret life? Do you have one? A life that only you, yourself, knows about?

Secret lives can be pleasurable, daring, risky, joyful, self-defeating, fanciful, neurotic, sometimes even foolish.

Take Walter Mitty, for example, the fictional character in James Thurber’s first short story "The Secret Life of Walter Mitty", published in “The New Yorker” on March 18, 1939. Mitty is a meek, mild-mannered man with a vivid fantasy life. In a few dozen paragraphs, he imagines himself a wartime pilot, an emergency-room surgeon, and a devil-may-care killer. Although the story has humorous elements, there is a darker and more significant message underlying the text, leading to a more pathetic interpretation of the Mitty character.

Or what about Elwood P. Dowd, the character Jimmy Stewart plays in his Oscar-nominated performance for the 1950 film, “Harvey”? The story of an alcoholic middle-aged man, suffering from hallucinations, whose sister and niece are trying to have him forcibly institutionalized so they can take his house, Stewart never winks once in the film. He doesn’t play Elwood as a man hallucinating, but he commits entirely to Harvey’s reality. In a time before ubiquitous green screen acting, he makes an unseen Harvey believable in a way that lets our imagination color the Rabbit right into the scenes. While the Dowd character, like Mitty, does have some darker interpretations, looked at in another way, it’s the story of a lovable eccentric and his magical sidekick, Harvey, breaking the people they encounter out of their cynical ruts, through attentive loving kindness,

Of course, other films and books have featured characters with much darker secret lives: Peter Parker (Spider Man), Walter White (“Breaking Bad”), Hannibal Lecter (“Silence of the Lambs”), and Dexter Morgan (tv show, Dexter), all of whom lead seemingly normal lives, while in their “alter-realities”, they all simultaneously engage in dangerous and/or illicit activities.

Me? I… won’t say. For if I did, it wouldn’t be a secret any longer.

Was I a braver, more committed writer? Would I reveal my secret life?

No, I wouldn’t.

You might say I’m a sceptic, a disbeliever, an iconoclastic non-conformer. A sensitive soul with five planets in the astrological 8th house, the one ruled by secretive Scorpio.

So perhaps I am one of Marquez’ men… with a secret life.

Or perhaps not.

You can believe as you wish. That I’m Walter Mitty, Elwood P. Dowd, or Walter White?

Maybe… one day… I’ll reveal my secrets, turn them into literature, assign them to some other poor fictional soul.

Although it’s not my forte, not my métier; I don’t know how to do it… yet.

Three Different Lives?

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