Defined by Secrets

It's a difficult thing. How am I to discern the emotional and physical safety of those around me? How am I to choose friends? How am I to trust others? Well, we look at them, we make educated guess based on appearance and behavior; over time we rely on previous experiences with the person. And so, the outward is the testator to the whole.
Yet I would like to postulate that, as the adage goes, looks are deceiving. To know the inside, we must know a person's secrets. That's where true intention lives, true thoughts, true actions.  Secrets define us. We are the secrets we keep.
Family secrets, guilty pleasures, things you do when you are alone in the car, what you think but never say, what you write in your diary. That is who you are because the things you never say are the things you believe and they guide your actions.
The abuse survivor, who never discusses the experience, goes through life believing that he or she caused the abuse because they sometimes provoked it purposely.
The person who goes quiet when jokes are made because not one knows that he or she is what is being mocked, feeling isolated and wrong.
And even the less serious - the person who picks his nose, the friend who made you swear never to tell about the time when ...., the invisible disdain she has for her husband's laugh.
This is who we really are.

Secrets, secrets are no fun

Secrets, secrets hurt someone

Perhaps due to my line of work I've seen secrets be weapons of metaphorical yet catastrophic wars. I think that often we are ashamed of these secret lives and we fear abandonment should anyone find out or retribution and revenge or humiliation. But it causes lies to fester and we believe the lies. It's safe in the short term to keep secrets and so they keep us, like prisoners we blackmail ourselves. We walked a fine line and do a pretty dance to appease the Secret Gods.

There are boundaries, things that we don't need to tell. What color it was, for example. And sometimes it's fun not to share - to have a mystery, to have something just for yourself. I'm not suggesting we say and do all for all, that we disregard privacy. But our secret lives are worth a peek in. It's worth evaluating if sometimes not coming clean about something we do only alone, is helping or hurting. And if it's hurting then stop the madness and tell the truth.

And the Truth shall set you free.