Posted Secrets

I stumbled across this site recently (http://postsecret.blogspot.com/). The first time I read through it, it affected me so strongly that I quickly found myself crying.


Revealing a secret creates intimacy or begets rejection and I can recall telling and hearing that resulted in both.



Telling secrets artistically allows a cathartic response unique to the aesthetic. We have some distance from these secrets, because they are not told to us personally. They are not about us at all. However, the aesthetic transcends any particular human and is at once absolutely human. Looking at these secrets, we respond emotionally, and emotion is essentially personal. The anonymity and absence of the artist (confessor) and the indeterminacy of the particulars binds us all together somehow. If I see my own secret or something similar I feel a connection with someone somewhere. Secrets unlike my own provide a glimpse of human complexity.


Hearing other people's secrets grants us some freedom from our own. Secrets wrapped in shame twist us up inside and distort who we are. They turn simple humanity into perversion. Shame is a strong motivation for secrets, but there are other reasons not to tell. Suppose one tells a secret and the reply is "You shouldn't feel that way."


Sometimes our feelings are at odds with what we understand to be rational. Sometimes we wish we didn't feel something or wish we didn't believe something. And yet we do feel it; we do believe it. Thus we are in conflict with ourselves. When we hate our own secrets, we suffer quietly, at war within.


Why hide something if we are not ashamed? Maybe we fear the reaction of others even if we do not disapprove ourselves. For example, if I don't like to talk to the other moms, and I don't think I should have to, then my secret is not a resultof shame. It is simply a recognition of what other people will tolerate and approve.


Some secrets are nothing more than things we haven't told because we don't really know what they mean. We have no answer for the inevitable "Why?"


Secrets can become lies by omission. We deserve our privacy and we are justified in keeping some things to ourselves. However, honesty is the obligation of a person trying to live well and sometimes others deserve to know things that are difficult to tell.


We have so little access to the inner lives of those around us; there is so much we cannot fathom. Knowing that people keep secrets prevents me from assuming that I have someone figured out. Secrets discovered and kept can be such pleasure and such pain. They include events of which we are ashamed, inclinations upon which we will not act, and feelings of which we do not approve.