Secrets

Another in the occasional Being Human series of posts.

When I was a little kid, secrets were friendship currency. “Having a secret” actually usually meant that you had shared something with someone that was so interesting that everyone else would want to know it too, if only… But it was our secret. That’s how we proved we were friends. And it’s how we proved… what? That we were real. That we had Something Going On even if we were only seven. Of course I couldn’t articulate it that way then, but it’s clear to me that the enculturation of child Eskridge was already in full swing. I was already absorbing the need to be part of a community, and already feeling the pressure to differentiate myself in positive ways. What a hideous tension to put upon children — be different and be part of the group: fail at either and find the weight of adult concern or adult annoyance or adult irritation falling on you from a great height.

When I was an older kid, I learned that most real secrets are not friendship badges. Most secrets are too big, too frightening, too painful, too awful to reveal because we know that we might be severed from our group. We’ll be different in all the wrong ways. Secrets are like bags of pus in a person’s chest or stomach. They burn, or they are cold cold cold, or they ooze through us like slime. But they are not for sharing.

And so I was gobsmacked years ago to stumble across PostSecret. People mail in their secrets anonymously on postcards, and Frank Warren posts a new set every week. There’s a discussion forum, a community of people who support each other in revealing themselves. He also has a PostSecret page on Myspace where he posts additional secrets.

Yes, it’s a business as well as a service. There are books, there are speaking engagements. Good. It means he’ll be able to do it a lot longer, and give more people the chance to experience the profound act of letting go of a secret. I’ve been struggling here to describe that feeling, and it’s just… well, right now I’m not finding the right words. Maybe you can tell me what it’s like, this revelation of self that is desperate and healing and frightening and sometimes just makes things worse, except maybe it’s worse in a better way because now we can be known. We can be seen. And we find that even if a particular relationship or community or desire or goal doesn’t survive — that we do. We survive.

Sometimes when we think we are keeping a secret, that secret is actually keeping us. –Frank Warren, founder of Post Secret.

But the important word there is sometimes.

One of the most telling discussions on the PostSecret forums has to do with a secret sent in ages ago: If you’re waiting for a sign, this is it. Do it. It will be amazing. Pretty powerful stuff that goes right to one of the deep places of being human — wanting to be “sure” that our risks will pay off, that we are doing the “right thing.” Wanting a sign from the universe. And some PostSecret readers took this as their sign, as their impetus to take whatever step they’d been considering.

But as the ensuing discussion showed, the universe isn’t always talking to us, you know? Some people “did it,” whatever it was, took their risk, and were happy they did. Some were bruised and blinking but still kind of happy, or at least thought they were better off. And some people were smushed like a bug by whatever they did, left bitter and angry and full of regret. Because sometimes the things we want in secret, the things we fear, or yearn for, our secret curiosities and desires and dreams, are not good for us or other people. Sometimes the secrets keep us safe.

How do we know the difference? I don’t know. I’m still learning.

And I read PostSecret every Sunday to see what chances other people are taking, to witness their courage or desperation or sadness or relief. These secrets, they’re like little stories told in fragments. As readers, we’re coming in at the middle: we can infer the beginning, and we’ll probably never know the end. But still, for that moment we’re connected. I don’t know, maybe it’s like those days in the schoolyard — we shared it and now it’s our secret. Or maybe it’s that the internet shared it and found that it is many people’s secret, and so it loses some of its iron-jawed grasp on each of us. I don’t know. But it amazes me that human beings will find ways to be connected. If we can’t find them, we make them. And then we use them to show each other ourselves.