A couple of days ago, I blogged about the things I don't want to take with me into 2013. I've thinking about this a lot today as I'm packing away the Christmas decorations and cleaning out some miscellaneous stuff from the house. There was something I left off that list.
I don't want secrets.
Mine or anyone else's.
When I was writing Persona Non Grata, converting from the non-fiction Point A to Point Me to the substantially fictionalized story—and I can promise you that two years didn't all play out as depicted in that book—Absolem suggested I title the work Secret Keeper, or something similar.
"That's what you've been, Steph. You've kept everyone else's secrets, plus your own. That's who you are."
But secrets just suck. They can seem alluring, shared or created in intimate moments. They can seem seductive in their intimacy. When someone else gives you their deepest, darkest secrets, it can feel like there's a certain level of trust they have with you, like you're the only person who knows them well enough or is strong enough to help them carry this burden.
When you are the secret, though, that's perhaps the most double-edged of the covert swords. You're special enough to be hidden away, to be a covert truth to be shielded from prying eyes. But at the heart of that bond, at the heart of all secrets, is someone's shame.
There are things you keep to yourself or between you and a select number of people. The privilege of intimacy is sacred and beautiful. Surprises are wondrous moments sprung unexpectedly with utter delight.
But secrets are the things that hurt, whether yourself or other people. Secrets are the things that can only be whispered in the dark, because they are damaging to someone. Maybe several someones. To ask another person to keep a secret is to request that they carry the burden of your own shame—whether at your action or inaction or reaction.
In the process of cleaning out the
house since DH unceremoniously left, I have been blindsided by twenty years'
worth of secrets. Things were squirreled
away that should've been brought to my attention. I hid my own shameful truths from him. Sometimes we hid them from ourselves, which
meant we couldn't help but hide them from the other. And I always find the evidence of those
hidden truths in the most unexpected places, at the most inopportune
times. It never fails to knock the
breath out of me and to make me cry.
Had I known the truth of these things in the appropriate time, I probably wouldn't have felt so hurt about their specifics. But now, when they're coming to light sometimes twenty years later and only through accidental discovery, I am cut more deeply by the surreptitious nature of non-disclosure. I am appalled in specific and in general that somehow I wasn't worth the truth. I only know now because things have gone so horribly wrong, and I am stumbling upon the facts of things no one else has had the fortitude or the guts or the fucking balls to face. I am left to deal with them on my own and to clean up the mess of revelation like so much clutter in the basement.
It's all right there, along with the mud-caked yard shoes he left by the back door.
What it's made me believe more than ever—looking at his secrets, the ones I kept from him, the ones I kept for other people, and most especially the ones I became—is that secrets devalue a relationship. They are detrimental to esteem and the trust that is at the core of any kind of love. They make that relationship worth less than the shame of the secret.
To him and to so many others, I have been worth less than their shame.
I also know that I have been on the other side of that. I have damaged trust and love and honesty, in general and in specific, by keeping my own secrets. One damage doesn't negate the other, though; there's no tit-for-tat in that kind of emotional warfare. It just creates a mounting pile of broken promises and broken hearts that block everyone's path forward.
But maybe that's the hardest part of all of this, the trying to see around the damage and toward the future. It's hard not to get caught up in the vulnerable moments when all I want to do is cave into the crying and the heartache and the blame and hope to Hell that he feels it, too. Someone told me that eventually he will realize what he's lost, that he will eventually feel the hurt and pain that I'm feeling now. Whether or not that's even likely is moot—it simply won't matter. The damage is done, and I hope I will have moved past it by that time, if it ever comes. There would be no vindication in knowing there are more tears and screaming and sorrow later. If I'm not worth the grieving and the sorrow now, just like I wasn't worth it six months and a year and two years ago, why will it matter if he feels it then? In his world, I will never be worth more than the secrets he fought so hard to keep from me, and that definitely makes me feel like I never, ever had a fighting chance at the life I was told we were building.
I have worked hard to feel my own inherent value, to feel not worthless to the world and to myself. But it's reeling to feel like the person who supposedly loved you the most in the world maybe never saw the value in you at all.
I don't know what I was worth to DH. I don't know if he even knows. I will likely never know, because he will likely never face me to have that conversation. That's a secret he'll keep to himself, despite both me and himself, perpetuating the cycle of damage that's gone on for so damn long now.
So, to all of the unavailable men who may cross my path going forward, offering me their addictions and secrets that will passive-aggressively stall my own journey, stay the fuck out of my way. Take your damage and your destruction elsewhere. I don't want it. I have enough of my own tears and burdens to carry, and I just don't have the strength to carry yours, too.
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