Ashley Riordan, who I still just want to call Write To Reach Ashley, wrote a post a month ago called The secret life of everyone you know. It’s wonderful and you should read it. In short, no matter how well you know people, there is almost always more going on than you realize.
Everyone you know has a secret life like this. There are things they think about every day that they never mention. There are stresses you don’t know about. Insecurities you wouldn’t imagine. Criticism they have of you but politely keep quiet. There is a point at which this crosses the line from self-preservation to dishonesty, but no one knows quite where that line is.
I’ve been thinking about this line a lot lately. In the weeks before I left LA, I kept a great deal to myself. As I began to share these things, I was met with varying degrees of backlash for not having shared/confided earlier. I hate confrontation of almost any kind, and so my initial reaction has sort of been, “Well, yes, they must all be right. I should have told everyone everything.” That defaulting to an admission of guilt is evident in the way I talked about those things as I finally opened up.
The more I think about it — the more I think about all the things I still haven’t told everyone — the more I realize that I’m not under any obligation to share those things. Mostly, I’m sorry for the occasions in which I was genuinely dishonest, but in those instances there wasn’t any sort of line between that and self-preservation.
Dishonesty and self-preservation were the same.
That was the part that got to me, more than anything. That was what pushed me to leave. It wasn’t the circumstances, per se, so much as the realization that nobody was ever really going to get it, and the feeling that I wasn’t able to talk to anyone about those things. There are a lot of people in my life who would be quick to say that I (or any of those close to them) could tell them anything. Sure. Fine. You’re right: I can literally say any words to you at any point in time that we are interacting. That doesn’t mean that you actually want to hear everything that I have to say.
More than that, few people I know (myself included) are quite the quality listeners they like to believe themselves to be. Personally, I am listening and processing for solutions. Most people in my life are this way. It has only recently occurred to me how annoying I find it to be on the talking end of that equation. I don’t need advice or help with everything. Sometimes I just need to get through things in my own way and on my own terms.
My mom tells this story about when my grandma made them all go to family counseling. It happened when I was a kid, so it was basically a space for her to let go of things that she had been carrying around for decades. Part of that was her insistence that she had the right to say, “No,” without anyone getting upset. My mom said that while she absolutely had the right to say no, this did not extend to her the right to determine how others felt about it.
I’m acutely aware of this, but I’m not sure other people really are, when they insist that I should tell them all the things all the time. There is some information that is mine. It belongs to me and I am under no obligation to share it with you. When I choose to share it with you, however, I don’t get to decide how you process that information. If I’m going through something that I don’t particularly want help or advice on, I’m not interested in sharing with people who are unlikely to just listen.
The other reason I have been thinking about this a lot lately is that I have had a number of conversations in the last few weeks that have left me thinking,
“We need to talk about this more often.“ Big, scary issues, that I wish people were more open and honest about, because there are more people than you realize going through these big scary issues. And yet, it’s a lot easier to say, “We should all be more up front about X” than to actually be the one putting yourself out there.
I’d like to be someone who has more of an actual line between self-preservation and dishonesty. I don’t want to have to make choices between those things. Right now, I’m just not sure how to get to being that person all the time.