I have a secret

This feels like the right moment to share this, caught in the liminal space between leaving my old life behind and not yet fully stepping into the new one. I’m in this in-between city (still in my home country), laying the financial and logistical groundwork for my future project. You could call this a transitional phase.

In my past life, I did a lot of wildly different, fairly unconventional things. Whenever I met new people and they started to get to know me, they were usually shocked and wanted to hear more. That’s part of my secret, which I’ll get to in a moment—I’m just setting the stage for now.

One of those things was my work as a blogger, YouTuber, and writer. I’m not some globally famous author, but some of my posts and videos are the top-ranked in their (very different) niches, and my books have done well. Right now, there’s a chance one of my stories might make it to Hollywood through a U.S. company working on it—not the first time, either. That’s a side project, separate from my main life plan, and we’ll see where it goes.

Here’s the thing: when I closed the door on my old life, I left a message for my audience as a farewell saying I was starting fresh, but I didn’t tell them about this new blog. I could’ve leveraged that to kickstart a following here, but I genuinely want my old self to come to an end. That means leaving behind everything tied to it. I’ve mostly abandoned my social media, only keeping a few posts for a small circle of contacts (mainly to keep my family from checking on me). I plan to taper that off until I’ve quietly slipped out of their lives altogether.

Where I am now, no one knows any of this. My coworkers have no clue who I really was. I’m making a constant effort to blend into the background, biting my tongue whenever a topic comes up where I could say something interesting. My goal is to leave this place without anyone giving a second thought to that guy who was here for a few months. It’s harder than it sounds.

My secret is part of the plan. My old audience can’t know about my new project. The people who subscribe to this blog and follow along as it grows (before they eventually get bored, unsubscribe, and forget me) can’t know who I was before. And the people I meet from here on out can’t know about either side. I never imagined becoming invisible would take so much planning and effort—it’s something new I’m learning as I figure out how to become a ghost.