The beauty of a little thing called privacy
Kate Middleton, me, and all the things we do not know
Perhaps like you, I waited with bated breath for yesterday’s announcement from Kate Middleton.
Bigger royalists exist, to be sure, even if I tearfully watched the royal wedding between the former monarchists, ate up nearly episode of The Crown, and even labored through a memoir I found terribly whiny.
Ever since the doctored photo of Catherine, the Princess of Wales, on March 10th, the Internet has been aflame with “Katesperacies.” As one writer1 noted, “The whereabouts of the Princess of Wales after her planned abdominal surgery and subsequent recovery were not particularly high stakes, and so many reveled in the threads and group chats as the “what ifs” got wilder – the theories both more specific and more incredible at the same time.” Maybe she’d been abducted by aliens; maybe (in the photo, at least), she’d been replaced with a body double; maybe she she’d been treated unfairly by the prince and had left him once and for all! The list of maybes went on, longer than it ever should have, while we the hungry, rabid public, waited for the answers we deserved.
And then, yesterday’s news: Cancer, with a round of chemotherapy to boot. Although the Crown could have set the record straight weeks (or even months ago, when she first had surgery),2 they let human imagination run wild.
Middleton’s singular request on the other side of it all? Give me privacy.
Privacy is a word many of us find quite unfathomable, if we’re honest. But she’s a public figure. But she knew what she was getting into marry into the spotlight. But we have a right to know! All the “but she’s” in the world come out to play when it comes to the information we humans believe we have the right to know.
Even if we refrain from saying these sentences out loud, we believe these statements wholly true when the public figures we’ve come to know and love and follow fall from the hallows of our supposed grace.
In the world I loosely inhabit,3 I think about some of the major headlines of the last five years. Someone announces a divorce. Another person comes out as gay. A famous pastor has an affair. One half of a star-studded pro-marriage couple cheats on his wife, with another man. Just as the list goes on, some of the readers in this space do not even need me to utter the aforementioned person’s name because you know exactly who lives behind these headlines.
And you know exactly who lives behind these headlines because when these headlines surfaced, you were sucked into the need-to-know vortex of feeling like you deserved to know the details of their personal lives because they had shared some of their (personal) life with you.
I write “you” and I am also wholly speaking of myself here.
When a well-known public figure in my little slice of the world stopped posting on Instagram several years ago, I didn’t notice the lack of content at first. But when, a month or two later, she posted a photo without a wedding ring on her finger, my own pot of speculation began to stir. When she announced her divorce soon thereafter, I raised clenched fists in the air.
I’d done it, gosh dang it. I’d figured it out!
Then I waited, breathlessly once again, for her to tell the rest of us all the juicy details of her divorce. I mean, I deserved to know, didn’t I? Just as she’d put herself out there for public consumption, I’d eaten up everything she offered. Hook, line, and sinker, I waited for the information I believed was mine to hold.
That information never came, of course, for that story was never mine to know in the first place.
But how often we think we deserve to know. How often we neglect to remember the beauty of a little thing called privacy.
I laugh as I pen these thoughts: just as I tend to gallop down rabbit trails of deserve-to-know information, I am a fairly private person online.4
Sure, I write creative nonfiction. I tend to take stories of the everyday, which is to say, of my life, and churn them into words for public consumption. I may not have millions of people reading my words or following my social media pages, but I share tiny snippets of my life, here and there — if we’re both lucky, I invite readers into stories of beauty found in the everyday.
But these words are just that: tiny snippets of a life the rest of the world doesn’t necessarily see. Curated stories that tell a point I want to make. Overarching themes that do not necessarily divulge any real details. Which is to say, if you think you know what’s going on in my life by reading what I post on the Internet, you don’t actually have any clue what’s going on in my real, actual, everyday life.
You might have an idea of what’s going on. You might choose to read between the lines and venture a guess as to bigger events happening behind the scenes, but most of the time, you will not actually know what’s going on in my life unless we sit down to a cup of coconut coffee5 and I spill the proverbial beans.
There’s so much you don’t know, that you will never know, that isn’t yours to know.6
Because there’s a beauty to holding your cards close. There’s a beauty to sharing the depths of who you are with only a chosen few. There’s a beauty to honoring privacy in your life and mine.
And as the Princess of Wales might also say, is actually quite okay.
https://www.theguardian.com/uk-news/2024/mar/20/us-kate-middleton-conspiracy-theory
It cannot be emphasized enough what a piss poor job their PR & comms team did (or did not do, in this case). It was not her job to even have to explain her diagnosis, let alone have to ask for privacy. When someone — anyone — has a diagnosis such as cancer, it is their decision alone to choose whether or not they divulge the information to the world. And the job of any good PR department is to then tell the story in a way that honors their decision, no matter how public the figure.
As a spiritual memoirist in a post-evangelical, progressive Christian space.
Or I should say, I have become a fairly private person online.
A conversation, from this morning:
Him: “What do you think about this coconut coffee?” Her: “Oh, I think it’s wonderful.” Him: “Really?” Her: “Well, yes, I picked it out.” Him: “It’s just that coffee is not supposed to taste like coconuts, you know?” Her: “I guess I just like coconuts and coffee a whole lot more than you.”
See, I am letting you into my life!
There’s more I could say — about the privacy of my family, including how I’ve not honored their privacy in the past; about raising children in a world of microwaveable answers; and even about coming to age in a writing world marked by vulnerability and instant gratification — but I’ll refrain for now. Perhaps let me know if this is something you’d like me to explore in the comment section below.
There’s a lot here to be explored I think — about putting our lives out there for public consumption.
As a fellow Royal follower, and having worked in PR, I have felt all the feels this month around Kate’s mysterious photo release, the internet’s bullying and conspiracies, and then her announcement. I deeply feel for her, and I also agree the Palace screwed by releasing that photo because it was a half truth which is how so many PR teams operate. I hold a lot of questions around what does privacy look like for public figures in a media world that has perpetuated half truths, and what role does the public play in this? I think it starts by refusing to support media and online content creators who speculate for profit.