The Pros and Cons of Keeping a Secret
As a private person, I socialize by diverting attention away from myself. I use my intuition and empathy to protect my introversion, by asking other people about themselves. If you need to get something heavy off your chest, dig into a problem that seems to have no solution, or tackle a dreaded task, I’m an asset.
If you need to get the party started, look elsewhere. At the shindig, I’ll gravitate to a corner, where I’ll stumble over a lost soul. You can find me on the patio, under the broken light, hashing out a strategy with someone who is crying.
Over a lifetime of being a person who naturally invites confidences, I’ve come to understand how secrets are a subset of hiding, and why hiding is neither all good nor all bad. The course of action when managing a secret depends on the context.
At a company retreat, our departing leader gave each of us team members a book and a story about why he’d chosen that particular book for that particular person. He gave me Everything You Always Wanted to Know About Sex But Were Afraid to Ask.
Yeah. A lot of people in the room looked at me funny. I was the shy database manager. Why was I getting a book about sex? The team leader rushed to clarify, saying I was so easy to share secrets with I’d started a second database of private confidences. Everyone laughed at his joke.
For the remainder of that weekend, people sidled up to me with awkward smiles. “So. That database,” they’d say. “It’s not real, is it?” I’d search their faces and remember the things they’d told me, their careful words at last year’s retreat, or during the tour, or when we’d cleaned up after the office party, and then I’d assure them I hadn’t and wouldn’t break their confidence.
The database of secrets wasn’t real, but my colleagues’ fear of exposure was. Why do we yearn to tell the secrets we most want to keep? And when the stakes are high, how do we decide whether to open up or shut down?
We keep secrets to manage real or imagined repercussions. We may keep mum to avoid judgment, to protect our little ember of shame from view, to guard information others could use against us. Or maybe we protect information to engineer a surprise, to craft a better outcome. We hold tight, bide our time, and hope for an opening of love.
We keep secrets to remain in control.
The question to ask is this: Are you controlling the secret, or is the secret controlling you?
Secrets is a theme I explore in my novel The Infinite Onion. Oliver, one of the main characters, doesn’t realize the extent of the secrets to be found in his own life until an opponent appears on the scene—a sharp adversary with an agenda of his own. As both characters learn, the cut of a pointed question may injure when turned on another, but heal when turned toward oneself. Oliver’s journey is to master his aim. This is our journey as well.
What is your deepest secret? Why do you keep it? What does it protect?
When I lived in Germany, I guest-taught a class of middle school English students. We talked about reasons for writing, how writing can be used to communicate with others and with ourselves. I introduced the students to freewriting (writing without pausing) and its tendency to expose the hidden.
I invited the kids to freewrite about a secret, with the knowledge they would subsequently tear their papers into tiny bits, so no one would ever see what they’d written. “Tell yourself the truth on the page,” I said. “Give yourself the freedom to write any thought, to know yourself. Then we’ll pass around the trash can.” I posted a list of prompts to get them started and set a timer.
Do you wish you could change something about today?
What do you worry about?
Do you wish for something in your life to be different?
What happened today that made you feel good?
Heads down, pens busy, no hesitation. Those kids had a lot to say. They wrote and wrote, all earnest focus and heavy breathing, until the timer dinged.
By the time they put down their pens, the energy in the room had turned incandescent, truth’s beam a tangible presence. With each rip and then another rip of their pages, smiles and laughter erupted. They talked about the experience, about the joy of relief and acknowledgment. We discussed what to do if they realized they had thoughts that troubled them, and how to share with someone they trusted. Although I offered the kids the option to share their secrets with the class, almost none of them did.
The opportunity to write with freedom from discovery was enough to shift energy toward better, even when the secret was shared no further than the page.
Secrets we keep from ourselves dim us, but the solution is not always to share our secrets with others.
The silence of an introvert pries up a floorboard. The opponent with the pointed question pokes a drop of truth to the surface. An invitation to confess and then destroy produces a bright moment of relief. We tumble with our secrets, fondle and fold them, bring them to every experience and every interaction with the people we come into contact with, including ourselves.
The conundrum of when to open the lid and when to sit tight resolves with a short primer of instructions:
Tell yourself all your secrets. Bear your own light.
Be strategic about what you share with others. Control your own light.
But be forewarned and pad yourself with a cushion of love. “All your secrets” may include the realization “I don’t want to keep this secret anymore.”
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Alice Archer is the author of the literary romance novels Everyday History and The Infinite Onion. You can subscribe to her newsletter to receive a free story, notification of new articles and books, and more. She also writes nonfiction for quiet people as author Grace Kerina.
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