Secrets

Recently, more so than ever before in my life, I’ve begun to realize that no one ever really shows their true selves to others. We pick and choose various pieces of our whole selves to share. These pieces aren’t consistent, and we rely on trust to keep parts that we reveal to one away from another’s knowledge.
People who study human communication call this “openness” and “closedness”, simple and explanatory titles. They recognize that total openness would simply be intolerable. For example, most people would never tell their grandmother that they had a one night stand, but some would gloat about it to their friends. A person might never tell another that they cheated on a test, but most would report to everyone they know that they did well on it.
In my younger years, I would come home from school and my parents would ask me questions about how my day went, what I learned, how my grades were. Usually answering these questions with something cold and short, I would head straight to my room to call a friend who went to a different school. We would talk for hours about school. Why I couldn’t tell my parents the same, I don’t know.
I believe that most people rely on a combination of secrecy and limited communication between their various groups of friends/family to restrict the spreading of the pieces of their lives. In most situations, you can be sure that your friends are not going to be talking to your grandmother anytime soon; if they do see your grandmother, you rely on them not to talk about that one night stand.
In high school, I had classes with a girl whose mother worked with mine as a nurse practitioner. Kelli and I were merely acquaintances through our maternal influences. From her, all I ever heard about was the cute older guy she was dating, the awesome party she got drunk at, or how she took her dad’s car without asking. What I heard from my mother, through Kelli’s mother, was that Kelli was buying drugs from her older boyfriend, got a DUI leaving a big party, and got arrested for stealing her dad’s car after he reported it missing, not knowing who had taken it. Later, she dropped out of school, and I found out from my mother that she was on house arrest for six months. I don’t think she ever counted on my hearing these things.
There are possible obstacles to keeping certain things away from certain eyes and ears. Everyone has that friend that they just can’t tell anything to for fear of everyone else finding out. You’re careful around this person. You don’t usually talk about your romantic life, and you never talk about other friends. You fear the words that come out of your own mouth around these people; the people you know will tell someone else. Being in an intimate relationship can put up some hurdles here too. It may be hard to tell someone you feel very close to that you just can’t talk about certain things. Once you become very close with an intimate, it may be hard to hide certain physical misfortunes and bad habits that you have been able to hide in the past.
To solve the problem, good friends learn not to pry on certain topics that they have discovered are sensitive. Sociologists call this segmentation. Providing a relationship with some autonomy can also help this problem.
I remember talking with friend several years ago, who is now very close to me, and she asked me why I had moved away from my parent’s home at such a young age. I laughed nervously. I looked down at the floor. She told me, “never mind, I really don’t need to know.” I didn’t tell her then, and she never asked again. Last summer, she and I took a road trip across the country together; I finally told her. She is still the only person who knows the real reasons.
Who can we really tell our lives to? And if we find that person, do we really want them to know everything?