Did you click on this post because you thought I was going to divulge a deep, dark, juicy secret this week? Ha! Nice try- I’m not quite ready for that. You’ll have to settle for me talking about one of my favorite podcasts, Family Secrets. This podcast was created by Dani Shapiro, a captivating writer and storyteller that I discovered a few years ago. When her husband encouraged her to take a DNA test to learn more about her ancestry, Dani never imagined that she would uncover a life-changing secret about herself and her family; her father was not her biological father. Both of her parents were deceased at this point in her life, which led her on a quest to answer the many questions that flooded her mind after this stunning revelation. 

The subject of this podcast, secrets, is enough to seduce you and draw you in immediately. But Dani has the added ability to keep you coming back for more with her extraordinary writing and her soft, soothing voice. Whether she’s talking to David Kaczynski about the moment he realized his bother Ted was the Unabomber, or Zoe Shaw, a woman forced to give up her baby for adoption after spending months in a home for unwed mothers right here in Lynchburg, she delves deep into the meaning of secrets, and how they mold us into the people we are today. Many of the guests on the podcast have written books about uncovering their own secrets and the aftermath of that discovery. Dani’s own memoir, Inheritance, is a compelling look at what happens when everything we thought was true about our lives, turns out to be completely false. 

The tagline for Family Secrets is “The secrets that are kept from us, the secrets we keep from others, and the secrets we keep from ourselves.” Doesn’t that send shivers down your spine? The underlying theme of the podcast is that most of the time we know when there’s a secret. We have a feeling, a hunch, a suspicion that something isn’t right, and it sends us on a search for answers. Although many times the answers we are looking for lie within. 

Bear with me as I share a funny story. I promise this will tie in with today’s post. I was on my way to pick up my son from school one afternoon. I got in the car, turned up the radio and began backing out of my driveway. All of a sudden- BAM. I hit something. I was so confused- I have a back up camera on my car but when I fiddled with the radio it was disabled. I was using my mirrors to back up, but saw nothing in my way. When I got out of the car to see what I hit, this is not a joke, it was a fed ex truck. It wasn’t a little one either. It was huge, probably twenty feet long, parked in my driveway. How could I not see it? How could I not realize that I was about to back into a giant delivery truck? Shouldn’t I have somehow known it was there? And there’s the lesson in the podcast. Sometimes the answer is like the fed ex truck in my driveway; large, looming, too big to ignore. And one day when you’re ready, you’ll run right into it.