secret.jpg

There are probably about 50 people in the world who know me well.  In that group of fifty people, there are about three or four who know the things that I keep from all the others.  And there are things I don't put out to all, things I'm ashamed of or worried about having the general population know.  These things are not prison worthy, but things I just don't want you to know.  You might not like me very much if you did.  Or you would have had to know me a long time to accept these facts about my life.

After those 3 or 4 people, then I move out in circles to levels of truth.  One friend may know about X and the other Y.  But then I get to a place where I pretty much tell people everything, except for X, Y, and Z.  I'm not a shy person.  If you ask me a question, more than likely, I will give you the full answer.  But I do keep my little guilty hand close to me, only letting people whom I really trust the full truth.  And sometimes, the truth doesn't go over that well.

I think it's fear of being left behind, rejected, forgotten, avoided, embarrassed, humiliated.  What we often do and who we truly are can scare people.  If we said our truth at all times, we wold likely be alone pretty much all the time.  We hedge, we move around stories, we smile a lot.  We are scared of censure. 

Probably those things I don't tell everyone aren't that awful.  In fact, I wrote a whole blog about one of them, ran the idea past my boyfriend, and he told me what I already knew.  The subject matter was likely something I don't want the whole world to know about.  He said, "The fifty people who know you well all know about this.  But do you want your readers to know?  Do you want your students to know?"

I don't know.

One of my wishes is that people in the public would start a trend.  A truth trend.  When we ask the completely smooth skinned 40-year-old actress if she has had any cosmetic work done, she would say, "Damn right I have.  It's murder in this town for middle-aged women, and I have had Botox and fillers and micro-dermabrasion and laser treatments.  In fact, I'm hiding behind these sunglasses because I had an eye lift."

She would take off her glasses, and we would nod.  I would say, "Looks great.  But lay off the Botox a little.  I like to see your face move a little when you act.  But the rest is super."

How refreshing.

When we ask the President if he had sex with that woman, he says, "Almost.  I was too afraid to have full on sex, but we fooled around in my office.  I am so sorry.  I wish it didn't happen.  I have trust and intimacy issues. I made a terrible mistake."

I am sorry.  I was wrong.  How far those words go.

"I don't know" is something I often say to my students because I don't want to pretend that I do know everything.  At first, it was really hard to say.  After all, I was the damn teacher!  I should know everything.  Sometimes, I would talk around the answer for a long time until the students had forgotten what the original question was.  How exhausting.  As you might imagine, I know very little that there is to know in the world.

"I am sorry.  I was wrong.  I don't know."

You can live through it all.

And people do forgive.  People do forget.  Yes, it's not nice to answer questions of "Do I look fat" with "Yes, you look enormous."  That's not what I' talking about.  What I'm talking about is that first board you lay down on the lie bridge.

Don't build the bridge.

Maybe soon, I will post that secret blog.

Jessica