When I was younger, I constantly heard the phrase, “secrets, secrets are no fun unless they’re shared with everyone.” I used to say it if my friend whispered something to my other friend during recess or I’d hear it be chanted when I would start a phrase like, “Oh, I have to tell you…actually never mind,” to my buddies during lunch. Secrets are weird. It’s something you constantly have in your mind, but you’re the only one, or a select few, that know it.
I don’t want to make this sound like I’m not trustworthy. I keep my secrets, and other peoples’, as best I can. I’m just saying that, for me, it’s really not that easy. There’s no other feeling than having to look at someone, interact with them, knowing something about them or just something that could affect them and not being able to say it. My skin feels flushed, I feel hot and all of a sudden I’m hit with a sudden wave of anxiousness. I don’t want to lie to you, but I have to.
I think it’s fair to say that there are different kinds of secrets in this world. There’s the secret about whether or not you like that boy in your math class or the fact that you binge watch a guilty pleasure show like Gossip Girl on the weekends. Those are sort of throw away secrets. They are one’s that you would have no problem keeping to yourself, but if someone found out, it wouldn’t flip your whole world upside down. The next level is a sort of in between one. These are the, “few close friends” secrets. You tell your most trusted confidants and no one else. Maybe you made a stupid mistake last night and don’t want anyone to know but your friends or maybe you’re going through a hard time at home and don’t necessarily want to share it with everyone. Then there is the hardest level of secret and the one that I struggle with the most: the, “don’t you dare tell anyone” secret. These are the ones that, honestly, hurt my soul to keep. They’re our darkest moments, our worst actions and secrets that, if they got out, could potentially flip us, turn us and toss us around.
These kinds of secrets are the ones that follow me. If I know one, it sits inside my stomach and it just lurks there. It flips around, always letting me know that it’s there, waiting for me to just blurt it out. It happens with all these kinds of secrets, actually. There’s a scene from the movie Mean Girls where the main character talks about word vomit and simply letting secrets out of your mouth with absolutely zero control. I deal with this and sometimes I can’t control the blurting out that happens.
The catch to all of this is, I’m not incapable of keeping secrets. When I know a secret about one of my best friends or someone I’m really close to in some way, I won’t let them down in that way. I will keep that secret for them even more so than my own secrets. Yes, I’m a girl that can’t keep secrets well, but that doesn’t mean that everything I know gets shared.
