In defense of anonymity

To become anonymous is not to disappear—but to reappear as plural.

Last month I sat down to write Mom a Mother’s Day card, as I have nearly every year since I could form sentences. My parents cultivated this ritual early; holidays marked not just by gifts, but by handwritten letters, often double-sided, offering affection, maybe a little psychoanalysis, and a steadfast commitment to marking time with intention. Even during their turbulent years, Dad—ever the poetic heart—would scribble belated love notes on the back of a prescription pad. Hasty and borderline illegible, sure, but I still knew I was lucky.

But this time, my pen hovered. Not from lack of love, but from a yearning to speak from a place beyond the echo of things already said. I wanted to feel how adoration rises beneath my feet, from filaments that root one self into the loam of a thousand others. I wanted to know my love as something both ancient and immediate. And so, instead, I ordered her a basket of strawberry plants, raw chocolates, and let my longing settle into the unwritten.

The next day, as if the universe had eavesdropped, a friend told me about The World Is Writing—one woman’s breath-giving mission to send anonymous letters, signed only as “The World.” What a thing! To receive a message not from someone, but from everyone. A note authored not by ego, but by entanglement. A love letter from the collective, this offering invites us to lean into the mystery and not need to know from whom or what or where the message arrives.

On her website she writes:

Breathe in, and for a moment you hold inside you a future cloud, pollen from a flower across town, fears from a faraway mother peering out her dark doorway, molecules once in the lungs of a hunting African cat. We are now part of all these things, you and I, and more. Each breath of yours becomes a breath of mine. Know this, and just try to live your days the same as before. I dare you.

As Walt Whitman reminds us, we are multitudes. And isn’t it a kind of hubris to believe that what I write comes solely from me, and not from the sediment of ancestors, and the tang of Oregon Oxalis I nibbled from the forest floor this morning? The creator of The World is Writing shares with me her devotion to these multitudes. Each morning, she begins with a simple question, “World, what do you want to share with me today?” Then transcribes what she hears. “It doesn’t actually feel like MY writing at all,” she says. “I look back and am surprised by what was written, and even wonder, ‘Why isn’t the world more snarky or more upset with us humans? How is it so relentlessly LOVING?’ “

The impact of this work is gentle and profound, ever inviting both the writer and the recipient to “spend more time in awe… and believe in our interconnectedness” even when we can’t assign it a name. Maybe this is exactly where The World gets sassy, right down in her quantum particles. For once observed and named, she refuses to remain unchanged. “Box that!” she says with a knowing grin.

Maybe that’s what draws me to this work so deeply. It stirs a familiar ache, the longing to loosen, to slip beyond the frame of a name.

Sometimes I fantasize about disappearing.
Not dying.
Just logging off.
Getting a job no one cares about.
Growing tomatoes. 
Writing poems in the margins of a notebook no one reads. 
Not as failure.
But as a kind of freedom.

-

Huy Nguyen

Because to be unseen is sometimes to be free. Like the time I dressed up in a giant chicken costume for a Halloween dance party, paired to my boyfriend’s costume—black turtleneck covered in glued-on yellow Peeps. Freed beneath all that fluff, his “chick magnet” had no pull on me that night. This chicken found her funky.

But anonymity goes beyond freedom from being seen. It’s not just freedom from expectation or conditioned response. Those are still too individual, too tethered to self, even in absence. I like to think that anonymity is not the loss of self, but the retrieval of selves.

Why is everything new so soft? An infant’s cheek. A fern's curled fist. The tender, unarmored edge of an idea. Softness belongs to that which is still porous, still in communion with everything. But with time, we harden. We thicken. We forget that nothing we do is ours alone. Even your most intimate “I love you” might travel on the exhaled vapors of a stranger you neither know, nor love. When I signed Mom’s letter, Love, Kim, I named, I narrowed, forgetting that creation, at its root, is a receipt of relation. To send a letter signed The World is to remember: we are made of others; we are making others.

Anonymity, then, is not erasure. It is restoration. It resists the individualist myth that only what can be credited is real. It allows the work to speak untainted by brand, by expectation, by hierarchy. Think of the Guerrilla Girls. Banksy. The unnamed monks of illuminated manuscripts. As the luminous

David E. Perry

writes:

Great storytelling, best I can tell, means that even when the story seems to be about you, it isn’t. It is always about the story.

What if you are the story, not the author but the sentence, the breath between lines? What if the most radical thing you can do is stop needing to be known, and start becoming part of what is knowing?

I think often now of Unbound, a dance film I’m producing with dear friend and artist/director Sara Nesson, featuring twenty disabled individuals across continents. Each dancer records alone, in reflective embodiment, maybe in pain, maybe in a moment of expansion; yet when stitched together, their gestures form a single, fluid body. One movement flows into the next with no visible seam. No personal stories. No spotlight. Only a shared willingness to give themselves to something larger and honor its collective voice.

We call it a dance, but really it’s an ecology. A murmuration of bodies, each adapting, translating, trusting. It moves me to witness bodies so often isolated by their conditions willingly dissolve outlines for communal expression. A longing, not to vanish, but to become unbound. One of the dancers shared that because of her illness, she's often unable to participate in group experiences the way she yearns for. But this film is offering her something rare: a way to interact and respond, even without being physically present. A way to express the complex and often opposing emotions that rise in shared illness. To move together, even in solitude.

This feels like a kind of anonymity, one that expands into a self too vast to name. The edges of you and me blur and blend like watercolors; not a disappearing, but a reappearing in spectral plurality.

Anonymity isn’t vanilla. It’s a molé. A collision of ingredients no tongue can untangle. Dark chocolate, adobo, cinnamon, smoke. Is that cumin or date? The flavors don’t shout, they harmonize. What emerges on my palette is an alchemy. Like a crowded morning train in Delhi, or the sounds of sunrise just before Act I. Undifferentiated, clamorous wheels and wings and waking, tuning forks in the chest of the world, urgent and overlapping. It feels, at first, disorienting, like slipping into a sensory deprivation tank, where the usual signals fall away. The mind reaches for edges, for boundaries, for name. But eventually, in the hush, something new arrives; the absence of distinction becomes the presence of freedom. Freedom from conditioning, freedom from the known, freedom from self: unbound, and belonging to all.

And maybe that’s why I couldn’t write Mom that card this year—the usual “I” too small for what I wanted to say. I needed the message to come from field, from forest, from all the ways love moves that aren’t signed or sealed or sourced. Perhaps even from a love beyond time itself, one spacious enough to carry us both into this last chapter of her life, and beyond, where love no longer wears a name but returns to what it has always been. Unclaimed. Unending.

So with a mouthful of strawberries and chocolate, Mom received this instead:

a letter delivered from The World is Writing project

Did you miss my last essay In Defense of Longing? Pair them together for a deeper dive into unselfing: