The Diddy Dilemma
I watched the new Netflix documentary Reckoning this week—the one produced by Curtis “50 Cent” Jackson about Sean “Diddy” Combs. Four parts. Decades of allegations. A sprawling empire built on image, influence, and intimidation. And now, piece by piece, it’s all unraveling.
You’ve may have seen it. Or at least seen people talking about it. It’s one of the top watches on Netflix right now. And we’re eating it up.
There’s something satisfying about watching hidden things come to light—especially when the person being exposed is powerful, wealthy, untouchable. We love the moment when the carefully managed story falls apart. When years of spin finally catch up with them.
At least... when it’s someone else.
Here’s a thought experiment: Imagine you woke up tomorrow morning to a four-part documentary series about your life. All the things you’ve managed and hidden over the years, now exposed. The people you’ve hurt—maybe not on purpose, but still. The moments you’ve carefully edited out of your story. The versions of yourself you’ve let people see versus who you actually are when no one’s watching.
I’m not saying your documentary would involve the kind of horrors coming out about Diddy. (Hopefully not. Don’t ask about the baby oil.)
But would you be mortified?
I would.
Not because I’ve lived a secret double life. But because I know the smaller, subtler ways I’ve hidden. The partial truths. The curated honesty. The half-confessions that let me feel the relief of vulnerability without the cost of full exposure.
I’ve been thinking about this a lot lately. My wife and I have been having conversations about it. The ways I’ll share three-quarters of what’s going on but hold back the rest. Even in things that don’t really matter.
We hide behind bravado. We hide behind trauma. We hide behind our intelligence and our ignorance. We hide behind the noise, the silence, and everything in between. We hide in plain sight, offering just enough honesty to feel like we’re being real while still controlling the narrative.
Partial hiding is like a release valve. You get the feeling of honesty without the full cost. But it’s incomplete at best—and corrosive at worst. It’s like using a tanning bed to get your vitamin D instead of actually going outside. You get something. But it’s not the real thing. And over time, it’s probably killing you.
I’m also watching several friends right now pay the piper for years of hiddenness. Different situations, same pattern. The sin wasn’t what built the wall. The wall was the architecture of concealment they constructed around it—the managed stories, the partial truths, the carefully curated version of themselves they let everyone see.
And here’s what I keep coming back to: the issue isn’t just sin, or even the struggle with sin. It’s hiddenness.
Sin is universal. Struggle is expected. But hiddenness is where destruction breeds and festers. It often isn’t primarily the lust or anger or alcohol—pick your poison—but the entire system of concealment. The sin grew in the dark because light was never let in.
We’re not only fighting behaviors. We’re fighting the instinct to hide.
The Original Design
Go back to the beginning. Genesis 2:25: “And the man and his wife were both naked and were not ashamed.”
That’s God’s original design. Sounds like a good time to me.
Unhiddenness was the human condition. Full exposure, no shame. Nothing to manage, nothing to conceal. This is what we were made for.
Then Genesis 3. The Fall. And notice—the first response to sin was covering. Fig leaves. Then hiding from God in the trees. When God asks “Where are you?” Adam’s answer is telling: “I was afraid, because I was naked, and I hid myself.”
The pattern gets set right there: sin → shame → fear → hiding.
It’s been our default ever since.
And it gets worse. When God presses, Adam doesn’t own it. He blames Eve. Eve blames the serpent. Deflection and spin—these are just other forms of hiding. You’re not concealing yourself behind a bush anymore; you’re concealing yourself behind someone else.
Adam hides with Eve first (they sew fig leaves together), then he hides behind Eve (”the woman you gave me...”). First she’s his partner in concealment; then she’s his shield against exposure.
That’s the template for every relationship where one person throws the other under the bus when confronted.
The Engine Underneath
But why do we hide? What drives the instinct?
Shame.
Shame isn’t just feeling bad about what you did. Guilt says, “I did something bad.” Shame says, “I am bad.” And shame can’t tolerate exposure. It tells you that if people really saw you—the whole you, the unmanaged you—they’d leave. They’d be disgusted. You’d lose everything.
So we cover. We spin. We manage. We construct entire relational architectures designed to keep people close enough to need us but far enough to never really see us.
Brené Brown’s research puts it simply: shame thrives in secrecy, silence, and judgment. The only thing that dissolves it is empathy—being known and not rejected. But here’s the catch: you can’t receive empathy for the parts of yourself you won’t let anyone see.
This is the trap. Shame says, “Hide or die.” But hiding is its own slow death.
Why We Keep Hiding
When we’re depleted, overwhelmed, disconnected, or anxious, hiding feels like protection. Exposure feels costly—it requires energy we don’t have, vulnerability we’re not sure will be received, and the risk of being “too much” for the room.
The appeal of hiddenness:
It’s efficient. Managing perception is faster than doing the work of being known.
It avoids burden. We tell ourselves we’re protecting others from our mess.
It preserves image. Especially for leaders, admitting struggle can feel like disqualification.
It numbs. The hidden behavior—the porn, the drinking, the emotional affair—is the soothing. Exposing it would remove the relief valve.
And so we buy in. More often than we want to admit. The partial truths stack on top of one another like sediment, layer after layer, until we can’t even remember what the bedrock looks like anymore.
Hiddenness promises safety. It delivers isolation.
So What The Heck Do We Do?
If hiddenness is the real enemy—not just the behaviors it protects—then how do we fight it?
The obvious answer is accountability. Find people who will ask hard questions. Confess when you fall. Stay connected.
But here’s the problem: most accountability structures are reactive. Something goes wrong. Someone confesses. We pray. We make a plan to do better. We move on.
By the time the sin happens, though, there’s already been a series of internal moves that went unnamed:
Exhaustion no one knew about
Resentment that festered
Disconnection from spouse or community
A slow slide into numbness
Previous patterns of struggle that were never actually dealt with
The behavior was the end of a chain, not the beginning.
Jesus spoke to this in Matthew 5. “If your right eye causes you to sin, gouge it out and throw it away.” Sounds extreme. It is. But He’s not advocating for self-mutilation. He’s telling us to be passionately, relentlessly proactive about the things that pull us toward darkness. The eye isn’t the problem—it’s the pathway. Don’t wait until the sin happens. Go after the thing that’s leading you there.
Applied to hiddenness, this means relentless honesty about what’s tempting you, what’s building beneath the surface, what’s quietly gaining ground. With Him. And with others who can hold it without judgment or the compulsion to fix. That’s what “gouge it out” looks like in practice—not violence against yourself, but violence against the secrecy that lets temptation grow.
What if we got upstream? What if we named the struggle before it became action?
“I’m in a place where I want to escape.”
“I feel disconnected and I don’t know why.”
“I’m white-knuckling it today.”
I’d call this being known in the longing, not just the doing. And it requires something most of us don’t have: relationships that can hold tension without rushing to fix it or panicking. People who won’t flinch.
Temptation Isn’t Sin—But We Treat It Like It Is
James 1:15 says desire, when it has conceived, gives birth to sin. There’s a stage before the sin—desire, temptation, the pull toward something. That stage isn’t sin yet. But we can treat it like it is. So we hide the temptation, which lets it grow unchecked until it becomes action.
What if temptation itself became speakable?
“I’m tempted to numb out tonight.”
“I’m finding myself attracted to attention from someone who isn’t my spouse.”
“I keep fantasizing about quitting everything and disappearing.”
Naming temptation out loud doesn’t feed it—it defuses it. The act of bringing it into the light changes its grip. Like naming anxiety out loud diminishes its power over you.
Secrecy is oxygen for the things that destroy us.
Why Hiddenness Persists Even After Exposure
I’m watching people whose hiddenness has already been exposed. The secret is out. The damage is done. And yet—some of them are still hiding. Still spinning. Still managing the narrative.
Why?
Hiddenness becomes identity. After long enough, the false self feels like the only self. To stop hiding would mean facing not just what they’ve done, but who they’ve become. The mask isn’t covering the real self anymore—it is the self, as far as they can tell.
The sunk cost of the lie. Every new lie is an investment in the old ones. Coming clean now means admitting all of it—not just the behavior, but the years of manipulation, the ways they made the people who loved them doubt their own perception.
Protecting themselves from themselves. As long as they keep the story managed, they don’t have to feel the full weight of what they’ve done. Some people will burn their whole life down to avoid that moment of reckoning.
What I’m Learning
I don’t have this figured out. I’m in the middle of it—walking with friends, watching some marriages fight to survive and others collapse, asking hard questions about my own patterns of concealment.
But here’s what I know:
The gospel has an answer for all of it. Grace is sufficient—it always has been. But the person who refuses to stop performing can’t receive it. You can’t be met by grace while you’re still managing how you’re seen. Grace meets us in exposure. It cannot meet us in spin.
The one who hides can confess the behavior and still be hiding the self. They can say the right words and still be managing perception. The test isn’t whether they admit what they did. The test is whether they can be known—fully, without defense, without spin, without the curated version.
Here’s the simplest way I can say it: You cannot be defensive and repentant at the same time. Defensiveness protects the self. Repentance surrenders it. One has to die for the other to live. And you can tell which one someone has chosen by what happens when the wounded party doesn’t immediately accept the apology.
Hiddenness always has casualties beyond the one who hides. The spouse who’s been gaslit. The kids who sense something is wrong but can’t name it. The friends who were kept at arm’s length. Hiddenness privatizes pleasure and socializes pain.
Coming out of hiding requires safety, but it also requires humility. The room has to be able to hold what you bring—but you also have to be willing to be seen as less than put-together. Pride keeps us hidden even when safety is present.
Why Jesus Came
The gospel doesn’t just forgive sin. It invites us out of hiding.
This is why Jesus came. To undo what happened in Genesis 3. To reverse the curse, the covering, the exile east of Eden. Adam and Eve sewed fig leaves—and God replaced them with animal skins. The first death. The first blood. The first hint that God Himself would provide a covering we could never make for ourselves.
That’s the whole story of Scripture: God pursuing people who are running and hiding, calling out “Where are you?”—not because He doesn’t know, but because He wants us to come out.
Hebrews 4:13 says it plainly: “Nothing in all creation is hidden from God’s sight. Everything is uncovered and laid bare before the eyes of him to whom we must give account.” We’re already naked before Him. Fully exposed. Completely known. Confession isn’t informing God of something He doesn’t know—it’s agreeing with what He already sees. It’s stepping out from behind the tree.
And here’s the miracle: He sees it all and stays. He knows the unmanaged version of you—the one you’ve spent your whole life hiding—and He doesn’t turn away. He moves toward you. That’s the gospel. Not “clean yourself up and then come to me.” But “come to me, and I will make you clean.”
The invitation is to live naked and unashamed again. At least before Him. And from that security—from knowing you are fully known and fully loved—you can start to risk being known by others too.
There’s a line in 1 John: “If we walk in the light, as he is in the light, we have fellowship with one another.”
Hiddenness breaks fellowship. Light restores it.
I don’t know how all my friends’ stories end. Some of them are doing the hard work of coming out of hiding. Some of them are still spinning. Some marriages will survive this season; some won’t.
And honestly? Watching all of this has made me look at my own life differently. The partial truths I’ve gotten comfortable with. The ways I’ve controlled how people experience me. The things I’ve held back—not because they’re shameful, but because full honesty felt like too much work.
Maybe that’s the real invitation here—not just for the people in freefall, but for all of us who’ve gotten comfortable with the curated version.
We watched Diddy’s empire crumble and thought, Finally. He’s getting what he deserves. But the harder question is what’s hiding in our own story that we’ve never let anyone see.
The path forward always runs through exposure. Not managed disclosure. Not strategic transparency. Actual exposure—being known, without the performance.
Grace is waiting there. It’s been waiting the whole time.
The only thing it can’t do is meet us while we’re still hiding.
If this resonates, I’m working on a longer framework exploring hiddenness, repentance, and what it actually looks like to come out of hiding. More to come.