Figured Spring was here, the rain has slowed, the blossoms are out on the plum tree, time to get the bike out. Yesterday I was heading off to therapy - I don't go on a regular basis anymore as I am so freakin' healed - but I had called Jody the other day and told her that I had a sudden epiphany and could I come and chat. So, it was sunny, I was sunny, and Toots and the Maytals were thumping in my headset and I was on my bike and off down the driveway, around the corner and along the road. And promptly rode into a huge blue recycling container that someone had rolled off the sidewalk. Thump, crash, bang, wallop. I was so fucking embarrassed. My bike lying helpless beside me, and a burning sensation on my knee and elbow. Decided to change strategies. So biked back home feeling less like a homecoming hero and more like an accident prone wally and changed into 4 wheel transport and listened to talk radio instead of my i pod, and limped into therapy 2 minutes ahead of schedule and talked for an hour about secrecy.
I think a lot about the difference between privacy and secrecy. Not so much at the moment as I am distinctly single and therefore singularly unconcerned with what someone might be doing and not telling me about. But I definitely have a thing about the sin of omission. D'ya know what I mean? Privacy is a damn important thing. But I think some people mix privacy up with keeping secrets. Like a secret is the only way to have privacy. Privacy is something we can ask for, something we have a right to have and which others have an obligation to respect. But secrets are altogether different. Like when someone happily tells you their whole schedule for the next day, they tell you they are having lunch with their mum at 1pm and taking their best friend to dinner at 6pm. And then the day after that they tell you, that at 3pm they went to a shooting range with someone who has expressed interest in dating them. Just slipped their mind I guess.
Secret keepers are cowards and gamblers all at once. It's kinda strange, when you think about it. Most people who keep secrets do so because they want to avoid a possible reaction from another person. They might even do it to 'protect' the other. Yeah, right. But it's a gamble, for those who like playing the high risk stakes. You either get away with it completely, you get to do the illicit secret deed and the 'other' has no soddin' idea - the equivalent of five cherries in a row at Caesar's Palace, but if the secret is out, the consequences can be an all or nothing flat out knockdown bareknuckler. The equivalent of slipping all your winnings back into the slots.
So, there I was - thinking about secrecy because, like in most families, secrets were bursting out at every seam in the fabric of our lives. And I have been realising that I feel absolute terror, real physical fear, when I feel secrecy creeping into my relationships. Which could be why, and I'm only half joking here, I have pretty extensive conversations with myself about what I am planning to do for the next 24 hours....trippy. Just so my right side knows what my left is doing.
So, sore from my bicycle stumble, and filled with the urgency one feels when the clock is creeping towards the moment the therapist says 'the buzzer will probably go in about 5 minutes' and you get ushered out the back door, like a nasty little secret, I rushed through my epiphany. That it is not that I do not understand, appreciate or even encourage privacy, but that the very thought of secrets fills me with such dread that I probably do everything I can do to avoid even caring what someone might or might not do. It is a freakin' drag being such an emotional retard.
But like falling off your bicycle when you are a kid, and your mum says ' just get back on it again', I am filled with the optimism of learning how to do it, even at this middle aged stage. But given that I am actually falling off bicycles...now....
I think you are right, Jill. Privacy involves mutual trust and respect. Secrets that are kept on the guise of protection when someone is really just avoiding exposure of the truth involves distrust and disrespect.
I hope your ouchies heal quickly and you are back on the bike.
Posted by: Deb in Minnesota | March 12, 2009 at 09:11 AM