Got A Secret? Please Don’t Tell Me

We have all had this happen right? Someone shares a bit of gossip about another person. A friend maybe. Or relative. Maybe it’s a work thing. They tell us a big long juicy story and then end it with “Don’t tell anyone. It’s a secret”. What? Wait. No no no…

Yeah. It’s at this point that I think to myself I can’t be trusted. Don’t lay that burden on me? I talk. I talk a lot. I talk to myself. Often. To the point that I am annoying. Even to me. The problem isn’t that I will tell someone accidentally, although that may happen. My issue is more along the lines of how I feel when I am in the presence of the person that the gossip is about. Let me clarify.

Say someone is expecting a baby and they share with a few close friends. One of those friends shares with me. Now I am not supposed to know about it. If I was important enough to know, I would have been told from the start. Not in a second hand manner. And this is happy news. But now I have to bury this nugget of information somewhere it is hard to retrieve. Perhaps I have a chance encounter to the original player in this secret. All of my energy is focused on not speaking. Or I have to overthink everything I say before I say it, just in case I let slip a small detail. However innocent it may be. Or the opposing scenario where someone shares negative news. Then I meet the acquaintance who is having a bit of a bad time. Again, always second guessing my conversation. If I let something slip, they will wonder how I know. They either are bothered with the realization and wonder how I know, or more disturbingly, they ask how I know. I have two choices. Be honest and throw their friend under the bus. “Becky told me!” Now they are mad at me, Becky is mad at me, I am somehow in the wrong. Frankly I don’t even care about Becky. Becky’s life is something that never crosses my mind. Frankly that is the easy choice. Blame Becky. The harder option for me personally is to lie. I have to make something up on the fly which is always a struggle. But then I have to remember the lie. And that is just too much of an effort. At my age I struggle to remember reality. Frankly, I don’t want to be a liar. But if Becky is someone I care about, I am forced to lie. Sometimes friends suck.

The funny thing is that usually I am not really invested in the person or the event that people talk about. Most of the time I don’t know them or my acquaintance is pretty six degrees of separation. So the fact of the matter is I just don’t care what they think, say, or do. Let alone what secrets they have. I think people just don’t have enough to talk about so they talk about other people. I was quite a bit of a loner when I was young and it never occurred to me anyone would be interested enough in my life to talk about me. I don’t mean junior high bitchy girls. That’s everywhere. But I remember once hearing a story about myself and the source was someone I didn’t know. Someone years older who lived in a town I had lived in until the age of six. I actually look very successful in this story but I was very surprised because it wasn’t very accurate. Now the friend who told me about it knows me well and he and I had a great chuckle about it. We also had fun trying to unravel the mystery of the gossip channel. Now in this particular instance it was humorous, but also uplifting to hear a great and positive, although untrue story about yourself. But that’s not usually the case. Hearing ugly stories about oneself can be devastating. In those circumstances it’s best to keep it a secret.

My husband was not my oldest daughters biological father, but he was the only father she knew. He was her Dad. He knew her from the time she was born as did his family. It wasn’t something he shared with people. He didn’t want her to feel different than the other kids we had. As a result, I didn’t talk about it and it was very hard. We didn’t tell our other kids as my husband felt we should let her decide the time and place where she felt comfortable. One day she was watching an afterschool special that dealt with the same subject matter and she told her younger sister. She was quite young so it was hard for my other daughter to understand. But in time it just was. Something we knew but didn’t think about. We were just a family. And then one evening, we were having a barbeque, and my oldest daughter had some friends over. They were all around twenty years of age. One girl, who we had just met, was telling me about her family. Her Mom was remarried and she had two younger half brothers. “Just like my daughter had younger half siblings”. It was at that moment that my husband and I looked at each other, then at our son who was roasting marshmallows. We were both thinking the same thing. We had never told him. We just forgot because we didn’t think about it. Family knew. Friends knew. Neighbours knew. Some told their kids. Some didn’t. Just no one ever talked about it. Like the kids down the street They are adopted but no one even thinks to talk about it. Or the neighbour whose son had a baby with his girlfriend. They gave her up for adoption but later married and had more children. No one talks about it. But don’t worry. We did tell our son and he really didn’t care. For him it wasn’t a thing. None of these things are secrets. And it is best for people to share real life with their kids I think. Better than hearing it from a stranger. That is where the problem lies. If you keep secrets, someone will find out. Always!

I was recently at a social event and there were quite a few people there who are close friends with someone I know. While they all recognized me and knew me by name, I had no idea who they were. I haven’t been to an event at the friends house in years so I probably met these people twenty years ago. As we chatted and they introduced themselves, I apologized for not remembering them. Then one man said “Well we remembered you.” I think he was insulted. As I thought about it, I realized that in this circle of friends, I was a topic of conversation at times. They were probably quite up to date on my life. In their minds they knew me. Better than they really knew me. Again, they knew a story about me. And how I fit into their world. However, these people were never discussed in my limited contact with my acquaintance. As a result, I don’t see their faces, I don’t hear their stories, I don’t know them. They passed briefly through my life years ago. As I left the event I wondered to myself if what they knew was good or bad. But what I realized was what they knew was someone’s opinion about me. I also knew, no secrets were shared, because I don’t have any. I am an open book. And if I am unable to keep secrets about myself, I hardly think I can be expected to keep the secrets of others.

If you have a secret and you tell one person, it is no longer a secret. If you do something you are ashamed of and only one person knows what you did, it is not a secret. When something happens in our lives that we want the world to know we tell as many people as possible and the news spreads like wildfire. If we have a secret and we tell just one or two people, it spreads slowly. But in the end, everyone will know. My children are private people but in very different ways. I know that I share many stories and anecdotes but I truly want to respect their privacy. I don’t see these things as secrets. I see that they have the right to share their lives as they see fit. When people ask about them I share what I know the kids are comfortable with. It’s generic. Fluff. Sometimes even a little pride thrown in. They are adults now not just my kids. Don’t get me wrong. I have cried to friends about my kids. All Mom’s do. I have also cried often about my Mom, as I recognize how I hurt her. I wonder who she cried to? I know my kids have cried over me. And their father. I know they keep these things from me as I try to keep my sadness from them. Because we truly don’t want to hurt the people we love the most. So we share things with people close to us. Are these secrets? In my mind no. Because they can always be set free out into the cosmos. The difference is, when we share our pain with close friends we know how much they love us. We know they will listen but they won’t hold our emotions. They will walk away throwing our pain into the universe to dissolve. And we will walk away feeling healed and uplifted because someone took the time to listen. I may not want to hear secrets but I also have learned that I get to decide what is a secret. Our inner pain is not a secret to be contained. It is something to be shared and released or we run the risk of illness or depression. Life is too short for that