The Secrets You Take to Your Grave
Spoiler Alert: No such secrets will be revealed in this story.
We all kept secrets as children. It was one of the fun aspects of being a child — thinking we had the inside track on something others knew nothing about.
Back then those secrets were innocent enough:
“Susie likes a boy and I know who it is! Eew! Nobody likes boys. They’re creepy.”
“I know what Santa is bringing you for Christmas! I snooped and I’m not telling.”
“I hid your doll. I’m not telling you where it is.”
As children, we loved to have secrets and we loved to brag about our hidden proprietary knowledge. Being goaded into revealing those deeply held secrets was almost as good as having those secrets in the first place.
On and on it went. Being the secret keeper at six years of age was tantamount to being a bit of a spoiled brat. We would use our secret keeping power to control and manipulate. To that end it worked well.
As we grew, so did the size and scope of our secrets. We kept our own crushes hidden until it was prudent to reveal our inner-most souls. We didn’t tell anyone about our plans for the future, our desire to make majors purchases, our intent to move across the country — until our plans fell more into place and it was safe to reveal our goals without fear of judgement or recrimination or unsolicited advice.
When we made mistakes — some of them colossal in scope — we closed our eyes, pulled our collars up around our necks and lowered the brim of our hat (figuratively), hoping no one would notice or, if they did notice, hoping no one would care.
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Somewhere along the way, life got serious. Reality was often stunningly sharp and cruelly harsh. We weren’t as great or as smart as we thought we were. Everything didn’t always go according to plan or desire. Decisions made weren’t always good ones and efforts made in good faith could easily fall short.
Sometimes we were ashamed of the outcome.
When that happened, it was easy to lock those decisions, outcomes, failed efforts into some dark recess of our brain — convinced we would never share them with another living soul.
No one could goad us into a big reveal because we would never, ever, let on that we held a dark secret in the first place.
I suspect every last one of us has one or more of the type of secret that we will take to our graves.
Some of these secrets involve failed attempts at living life on a grander scale than our reality would indicate.
Some of these secrets revolve around decisions that went horribly wrong. The embarrassment of a romance turned sour. The job prospect that was really a financially disastrous scam that everyone could see except you. Decisions that were lacking in intelligent thought, morally corrupt or even outright criminal in nature.
These were the sort of things you would never want your mother to find out about. And so, to protect those you love from finding out about the deeper, darker side of you that causes you shame when you look in the mirror, you bury those secrets.
You bury them in life, and you hope to bury them with your ancient, decaying remains when you leave this world.
We all have those secrets.
How do I know this?
I know this because I’ve spent a lot of years observing the people around me. Sometimes the curtain is pulled back and the sinister truth slips out. The most reputable, upstanding individuals I have known have, at one time or another, inadvertently dropped a few crumbs that lead to an inconvenient truth they would rather not have shared with the world.
I tend to believe that no deep, dark secret exists in a vacuum. There will always be someone, somewhere, who knows enough about you and your secret to be a threat to your peace of mind. The best you can hope for is that you can spend enough of your life bobbing and weaving to avoid the detection of any small detail that leads to uncovering the ugly truth.
The more of these ugly truths you are trying to hide, the tougher life is going to be for you.
Social media has put a new wrinkle in the fabric of the secretive life. Whatever you think you are hiding may be discovered with a click of a technological button and revealed to the world at record speed.
If you believe that any attention is good publicity (no matter how horrible and notorious you may sound) then revealing your secret world may not bother you so much.
If, like most people, you feel your secrets will diminish you in the eyes of loved ones or the world at large — well, you will continue to dig deeper and not try to bury the ugly truths in a shallow grave.
Image is everything. In the public sphere or in the privacy of your inner circle, most of us want to portray strength of character. In order to do that, you may need to be prepared to share your grave with the secrets you’ve concealed throughout life.
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