secrets revealed

i continue to read post secret every week and i continue to find the world of kept and unkept secrets absolutely stunning. i wonder sometimes how common some of our best-kept secrets really are. i have secrets that i believe i will never reveal under any circumstances and some that i long to divulge as soon as i find a person who seems interested in having that kind of conversation. some of these secrets have been on deck for years. maybe that is where most of our secrets reside: on deck for disclosure, waiting patiently for a trustworthy recipient. i think that is also where most secrets remain. many finally find their way out through art or literature but that doesn't seem to carry the same degree of impact as the face-to-face revelation of the guarded information we keep so desperately entwined in our souls.

but what is it about the rush and relief of revelation? why does it feel so liberating to tell someone something that begs for the contrary? those who write in to post secret often attempt to discuss an ineffable sense of freedom following their anonymous disclosure. do our stigmatized choices and experiences really carry this much power over our psyches? over our bodies? i think so. adolescents often propagate their own brand of weirdness by not knowing what kind of information is expected to remain concealed and what is free to share. teenage girls are notorious for telling everyone everything and then annihilating each other with that information. as adults, we know how to name only those things about ourselves and our experiences that will allow us to present as fully socialized and safe for interaction. and we know the kinds of things that will create cause for suspicion. but what if we didn't care? what if we just decided that facts are facts and the past is the past and we chose to be free to tell the world everything? would any of those things be stigmatized? would we all be crazy? or would we all finally be liberated by the knowledge that we are all just as fucked up as our friends and neighbors? i generally believe myself to be a functional and stable adult, but given the free and practically universal access we have to things like the DSM-IV, one must be careful around those who liberally associate patterns and quirks with diagnostic criteria. and that is why we are all as careful as we are, right? it doesn't take much to raise an eyebrow. and there is nothing more entertaining than comparing an acquaintance's behavior to an inventory of personality disorders, right? anyone with a DSM-IV close by has done it.

all of this is circulating in my mind right now as i contemplate the many potential fates of our "secrets" in popular culture. hundreds of thousands of people are submitting anonymous secrets to a man named Frank, whom they don't know, in maryland. and it seems that daily there is a new book published as autobiography or memoir or thinly-veiled fiction. these books reveal secrets about the author's life that are potentially devastating to one's future and career. do these writers simply take the plunge into publication hoping that this genre will maintain it's voyeuristic appeal and continued publication of private psychosis will earn enough money to pay the bills, thereby voiding any future need for gainful employment? there is also, of course, the antiquated method of unearthing the past and the truth known as psychotherapy. but that is expensive and carries the enormous burden of diagnosis. not to mention the presumption that some kind of work or healing is required by those who have contained their secrets for extended periods. i remember exercises at church camp that encouraged us to write down our secrets on paper and then toss them into a fire. i know that it registered high on the teen-drama symbolism meter, but i honestly don't know what that was supposed to accomplish. i remember wondering if this was supposed to make the secret go away so that we felt we would never have to deal with it again in any capacity. and i wondered what people were writing on those pieces of paper. especially since i had sat up all night the night before listening to those same kids tell me all about their private sinful ways and the shit their parents would never know about. what could these kids still have to call a secret? sometimes at church camp, people forget that these are still our classmates from school and even though you had a bonding moment while leaning over a candle at devotions, it is highly likely that your "friend in christ" is still going to tell everyone in the locker room that you had sex after a football game last fall. i was so boring during those talks. i didn't have sex then and i rarely did anything my parents wouldn't approve of. so i tended to be very quiet during the disclosure talks and i always wrote the same thing on those little pieces of paper: "i stole nail polish from target when i was 11." i burned that secret so many times! and the truth is, i never really have felt all that guilty about it. everyone steals from a store at some point and most of us get away with it. i never did it again, because it took me a long time to stop shaking and rid my mind of the belief that someone was watching me all the way home. but by the time i was old enough to hear the stories that i heard at camp, my guilt was long-gone. but i burned it over and over because i could never think of anything else.

denying, burning, trusting, therapizing, mailing, publishing. so many ways to treat a secret. i choose blogging.