Secrets Secrets Are No Fun
Everyone has a secret. Most people have a few. In Twelve Step programs they say that “your secrets keep you sick.” Nothing is that black and white. In some cases, keeping our secrets keeps us safe. I’m not just talking about addicts, I’m talking about everyone: we keep things to ourselves because the world, our society, our community, our friends, our family… the ones who swear they would never judge or love us any less no matter what we do… they would judge, and they would love us less. Maybe. Its best not to express the truth and risk it.
Humans have great instincts. … about some things. When an object flies at our face, we duck. When the wind blows harder, we pull our coats tighter around our bodies. When we slam on brakes unexpectedly, we throw an arm across the person in the passenger seat (kindly, but futilely) to lessen the force with which they are thrust into the dashboard. Its beautiful when you think about it: not only do we have the reflexes to protect ourselves, but we are also endowed with the anthropological impulse to protect our tribe.
Keeping secrets is another way of shielding our clan from the dangers that lurk. We don’t want them to see how the sausage is made because they would be burdened and repulsed, rightfully so. Our secrets are often battles that we chose to fight alone so that we wouldn’t have to draft anyone else into our army. Asking another person to fight with you and fight for you is asking a lot. It costs time, it costs sanity, it costs sweat, blood, and limbs. So, instead, we grab a helmet and go it alone.
Nothing feels as validating and victorious as winning a battle that you had to fight by yourself. You walk away believing that you are invincible. You become more willing to jump into solo combat. You gain proficiency in war tactics: you sew your own chainmail, you sharpen your swords against pebble whetstone, you review your plays over and over like a high school football coach in Texas. However, while you are becoming fiercely independent, you are also pickling inside your armor.
People are fickle beings that are full of contradictions. While we are accumulating pride for our ability to slay our enemies with just the one sword and the one shield, we are also becoming increasingly bitter and increasingly exhausted. We chose to fight alone, yet we are angry that we have to fight alone and that there was ever a fight to begin with. We didn’t pick it. Overtime, our sense of gallantry fades and we find easier, lazier ways to defend ourselves. Instead of deflecting arrows, we duck and let them hit whoever is behind us. Instead of hiding and waiting for the opportune moment to strike… we just hide. Worst of all, instead of targeting those who are specifically targeting us, we throw bombs that wipe out whole armies… but also cause civilian casualties. We started by trying to keep our tribe safe and out of our personal turmoil, but now our conditioned negligence is leaving a path of destruction that our own people may never be able to dig themselves out of.
I will never say that there is a “reason” or an “excuse” for addiction because there isn’t. However, if you dissect an addict (or any human for that matter) you will find that there were catalysts for why they are the way that they are. Some people fought their battles and it made them hard to the world. Now, they are cold, closed-off, and angry. Some people tried and failed to fight their own battles and became detrimentally codependent. Others became plagued by the absence of reasons for why they were attacked and haunted by the injustices they endured during wartime. Now, they cope however they can, no matter who it affects.
Again, and I cannot stress this enough, trauma does not justify addiction. Nothing justifies addiction. If you are an addict, you had problems like everyone else. You lived through it like everyone else. But, instead of dealing with it tactically and sustainably you took the path of least resistance. That choice is what makes an addict inexcusably, unjustifiably, indefensibly an asshole. You got dealt a bad hand, sure, but you fucked up—make no mistake about it.
I wouldn’t say that “secrets keep you sick,” but I would say that secrets are acidic. They eat away at your soul and your psyche slowly over time. We have the instincts to protect our tribe because we were meant to have a tribe—a community over which we could disperse our burdens so that they would be easier to carry. So, yes, sometimes we keep our secrets to spare others the annoyance of knowing them. Other times, we bare our secrets alone because we are ashamed of them. Even when we aren’t the ones who deserve the shame.
I had a falling out with my therapist recently. It took me a long time to find a therapist I could actually work with because I’m arrogant and I think I’m smarter than everyone else. Also, I rarely accept simple solutions like, “just get through it,” or “tell them how you feel.” What kind of white people nonsense is that?! Anyway, I finally found someone that met me in my own headspace and slowly, painstakingly, began to pull me out of it. She got me through the lowest moments, days, weeks, and months of my life. I trusted her implicitly. That is, until she challenged my gallantry.
What started as a charming anecdote about how I currently am, and always have been, really bad at math, became an atom bomb on our weekly sessions. I told her that I had to go to tutoring constantly for every math class that I took in high school just to squeak by with a C, and I nearly failed physics. I stopped going to physics tutoring halfway through the semester because my teacher would ask prying questions about my love life (I didn’t have a ‘sex life’ yet, I was only 15) and had shown me porn once. Being alone with him made me uncomfortable and I couldn’t always count on another student showing up for tutoring, so I just made myself comfortable with the idea of a D.
I didn’t tell anyone at the time, because why would I? He was an adult and I was sure he had his reasons. In fact, despite how uneasy he made me feel, he also built me up to think that I was mature and worldly. I must have been special if he could trust me with something so taboo. I must have been emotionally advanced, compared to the other students, if he thought that I could handle seeing and comprehending something like that as a 15-year-old girl. Alas, I was indeed a 15-year-old girl, and a sheltered one at that. I comprehended nothing about pornography or the fact that a grown man—an educator—was crossing more lines than there were on the scrap graph paper I was using when he was actually tutoring me.
Two years later, I took another one of his classes. It was a small program, I didn’t have a choice. This time, he made me his public pet. He’d make profane jokes about me in class, he’d sit his ass directly on my desk when he’d talk to anyone around me. One time he saw a copy of Cosmopolitan magazine sticking out of my tote bag with a headline that read, “75 Sex Tips to Drive Him Wild.” He confiscated it and returned it to me the next class, with his editorial commentary in Sharpie all throughout the cover article. I thought I was just being sensitive until our valedictorian, who was an incredibly sweet, quiet girl, asked me, “does it bother you that Mr.* talks to you so… seductively?”
Yes, it bothered me. But the idea of snitching and making a stink about it bothered me more. Who was I going to tell? My parents? My Dad was drunk and my Mom was busting her ass to support all of us. They didn’t need a fresh cataclysm to add to their list. The IB Coordinator? The man was so old that he taught my mother when she was in high school—I rather die than look him in the eye and say, “hey, Mr.* keeps asking me if I’ve blown my boyfriend yet, and I’d appreciate it if you’d ask him to stop.” The principal? The man who circulated a form saying that having a cell phone on campus was equivalent to bringing a weapon to school…? Yeah. He seemed reasonable.
Moreover, nothing had technically happened. I hadn’t been abused or assaulted. I felt silly about starting an upheaval over some questionable dialogue and one incident of having to view a video that I did not enjoy seeing. So, I kept it to myself. I put on my armor and I muddled through with a polite smile and the comforting knowledge that I’d be going to college soon, where men never treated women questionably. Sitting on my therapist’s couch, I displayed that past situation like a badge of honor. It was difficult, I got through it. I pressed forward. I didn’t cause any trouble. I kept my secret and I survived. I. Me. I was a conqueror and no one in my tribe had to be bothered with any part of it.
15 years later, it has become clear that I was not a conqueror. I was a coward. Shoving it down, collecting a diploma, and walking away from it was my first instance of doing the easy, careless thing. Before I drank my life and my family into ruins, I let a pervert go unpunished. I drank about that a lot. How many girls came after me? How many of my friends had little sisters—one, two years younger—that took his class after I left? Did he escalate? Predators always do. If I couldn’t say something to another adult, why didn’t I have the guts to confront him? Why did I smile—I fucking smiled when he would ask inappropriate questions. He added his own “sex tips” to my girly magazine and I THANKED THE GUY.
Did I set a precedent? Did I lay out a welcome mat right where I should have built a fence? Did I make him believe that every girl after me would smile, and giggle, and thank him for his repulsiveness? Or worse… is there a 28-year-old girl out there right now, 7 vodka tonics deep, falling off a barstool, trying to drink away the memory of her science teacher putting her chipped, blue nail polished hand on his cargo pants erection? Does she know that a sober 30-year-old could have saved us both years of addiction and regret if I had just had the guts to look that man—nope, sorry, he’s not a man—if I had just had the guts to look that predator in the eye and say, “No, sir. Absolutely not.”
Yet, here we stand on the corner of “can’t change the past” and “can’t drink about it either.” My 10th grade science teacher did not make me an addict. My prevailing need to avoid conflict and seek comfort made me an addict. Which is why this issue is not addict-specific. When we coddle our secrets and snuggle our shame, we aren’t winning any battles. We’re retreating from the frontline, leaving our enemies the time and space to strengthen, recruit, and come after us with twice the vigor. What happens after that? You push people away, you pull the wrong people close, you fall into depression, you get overwhelmed with anxiety, you drink away the thoughts that keep you up at night… you run, and you run, and you run, and you run, and you fall.
Once you’ve fallen, the only thing left to do is finally admit to your tribe, “I can’t do this alone anymore. I need you to know my secrets.” As someone with a lot of regrets that have been thoroughly combed through and analyzed, I find that only regret still keeps me awake at night… that I didn’t ask my tribe for help sooner.
