secrets of the heart

What you see isn't always everything.

It sure is easy to think that we know those who are close to us. We want to believe that what we see and hear from the person is all there is to it. But we can never know for certain because what really goes on inside another’s head and heart is essentially a secret.

As Gail Saltz wrote it in the ‘Anatomy of a Secret’ which I'm reading, “to have secrets is to be human”.

I am certainly very human. Even while I find comfort in the anonymity of this blog, often, I find myself censoring my own self for fear of revealing too much. Maybe it’s because I simply can’t bring myself to allow a stranger to know ‘me’ without me having an equal chance to know him too.

Secrets are, as Gail had aptly captured it, “the currency of close relationships, the coin of exclusivity, sometimes the key to love itself”.

If I choose to share my secret with you, it’s because I trust you. And with trust, it’s always a risk. I guess that’s the reason I fear I may end up being hurt somehow if I reveal too much of myself to anyone other than my selected few. Believe me, my fears are not unfounded. I once confided in someone I was comfortable with but not exactly close to just because the ‘distance’ gave me a faux sense of security and thereafter, things went horribly wrong. Lesson learnt, now with people I am not close to, I live by the line “You tell me your secrets and I’ll tell you mine. Maybe”.

Secrets – can’t live with them, can’t live without them.

We all have secrets. I know I guard mine fiercely, allowing only those I’m close to aware of my vulnerabilities. Maybe the very people I’m close to keep secrets from me, and I fully respect that. But it can hurt sometimes when you know they’re doing it. After all, if those close to you harbour secrets from you, doesn't that mean they are intentionally excluding you from their lives?

It hurts even more when you know that after opening yourself up totally to them, they would only share scraps of fuzzy, vague details to you. I guess for me, it just makes me wonder where I stand in the relationship.

And while we may say that someone who doesn’t know everything about us doesn’t really know us, can we truly say that we know ourselves?

As a quote from Frank Warren goes:

There are two kinds of secrets:
Those we keep from others,
And the ones we hide from ourselves.

The secrets we keep from ourselves are the ones we simply refuse to acknowledge. They are the ones that we bury over time and we’d become embarrassed or enraged if we ever feel the slightest threat of being exposed.

Just like the secrets we keep from others, these inner secrets too, want to be released. So they try to escape somehow, and give themselves away through fleeting facial expressions, dreams and slips of the tongue, etc.

Has someone you’re close to ever done something inexplicably out of character? I know someone. When I discovered it, I realised suddenly that I didn't know him very well. Maybe even not at all. I suppose that’s when the malignant secret take on more troubling forms.

But without access to these inner secrets, we can’t really know ourselves at all. Instead, we’re forced to spend our lives in a state of continual vagueness, ignorant of the reasons behind our own actions and perceptions.

When someone commits something we would least expect of him, naturally we will question the need to conceal. I believe it’s not the ‘what’ but the ‘why’ that matters most.

If he refuses to reveal why, then I suppose, he is making a choice to hide his real self not only from others but also from his own self. And unless he faces up to the secret he keeps from himself, it will only be a matter of time before the malignant secret starts spreading again to find an outlet through troubling forms.

And when you find someone in whom you can confide all your secrets and who in turn can confide all his or her secrets in you, then for the first time since infancy you will have found a person who seemingly knows everything about you, and that is what we might call love.

And if I may find someone who will lead me to the heart of his secrets, I will not hesitate to lead him to my heart.