“Don’t tell this to anyone but …” — literally the start of most my conversations with my closest friends. I’m talking about more than that, about teeny tiny bits of facts, personal or professional that people share with you even when you did not ask for it.
I used to not share a lot with people until we became really close. When I heard this ex-friend told me all her trauma and abusive past, I thought: she probably told me this only because we were close. Because that is the way I see the world, I mistook it for hers.
Only until I saw this girl sharing all the same details with someone she met for the first time, did I realize:
Some people just share because they need an emotional dumpster
She once told me about a romantic rendezvous of her other colleague and a friend of hers. Words got leaked out, her friend questioned if she spilled to tea to others, and she began to question everyone. It feels funny how some people voluntarily share information with those remotely relevant to the incident, then gets triggered when that cycle is repeated by someone else.
Hmm… smells like hypocrisy to me. This was an extreme case, in the sense that this brought me back to feeling dumbed down to being in the middle of a secondary school’s cat fight. Like even my university time felt more straight forward and mature than this.
The thing is, things like this don’t stop in middle school
At work, in friendships, even at home with your family, you might be in the middle of a a “who spilled the beans” situation. You will either feel guilty or misunderstood, depending on, you know, whether you did it or not.
Meanwhile, as someone who had trust issues in the past, I know sharing also meant moments of doubts, and disappointments. Looking back at all these moments, these feelings are not necessary and in a way, mentally draining and objectively very time-consuming.
So… how do we free ourselves from them?
First, acknowledge how bad the secret was — whatever that you did. Then, own it. This means trying to understand that even thought it’s effed up, other people have probably done it worse (Honestly, if I ever want to feel better about my mistakes, I re-watch Euphoria — you are welcome for the quick tip).
Lastly, having understood that, accept that people will, one way or another, eventually find out. Aristotle once said:
“Man is by nature a social animal.
People chit chat, and sometimes words slip out of their mouths. Spilling someone’s story doesn’t make you a criminal, it makes you human.
On the other hand, when I share, I realized I ask myself a lot of questions: “Can I trust them? What if people know what I did? What if they tell others?”. A lot of these questions stem from the fear of being disliked by people, the moment they know something I did. The thing is most definitely, it will always be disagreed by at least one out of the 7 billion in this world. People have different lives and values.
They don’t like what I did — so what?
That’s who I used to be, and that made me grow to the way I am today.
As the one who listen wholeheartedly, secrets used to put a weight down my heart. I felt like I had to tiptoe and avoid saying anything close to the secret topic. I’m not telling you to shout to everyone that THEY ARE SLEEPING TOGETHER.
However, just be open, sometimes people already know and even if they don’t, they usually can sense it. It’s hard to run away from answering a question you know. In any cases, please don’t question or guilt-trip yourself just because of that sense of “duty”.
Summary
As anyone in their 20s and above, I think we have understood our experiences enough to know that:
If you don’t like it, keep it. If you say it, people will know it.
That’s all for today. We all live in a society and communities, making hundreds of conversations everyday. Just have fun learning new things from these chats, and take it easy when these seemingly tricky situations come by. You will be fine :)
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