By Stephanie K. Hopkins
When I was a kid, my parents never went through my stuff without my permission. I know now that growing up trusting that my private space was my private space is unusual. But the respect they gave me and my one-hundred and eleven stuffed animals allowed me to get to know myself and develop in important ways. My stuffed animals may have suffered a little under the freedom—finding themselves in the occasional compromising position with one another—but it was all in the name of personal growth of course.
I wrote my most embarrassing thoughts in a diary I knew no one would read. This meant I wasn’t writing for an imagined prying audience, but to discover who I was. (Years later, I write my most embarrassing moments on the page for the public, but that’s another story…)
I feel very lucky to know what privacy is. My childhood taught me to value experiences that are mine and mine alone and also to respect what belongs to someone else.
But sometimes the line between what is mine and what is yours can get tricky. Like when other people tell you their secrets, or they tell you secrets about somebody else who isn’t supposed to know that you know their secrets. I hate that. Once we’ve crossed over the line from privacy to secrecy, when it’s not my information but someone else’s I’m supposed to hold onto, I start to feel icky.
At first, being told a secret can be exciting. Like you’ve just been let into a special club. But it’s a club that thrives on the exclusion of others, and so admittance comes at a price. You can’t tell others you belong in the club or they’ll know the club exists, so even the membership itself is a secret. This kind of club makes me sweat and act funny. I prefer a more relaxed club, where everyone is welcome to get their dance on.
There’s a seductive Mission Impossible quality to secrets. You can bond with one friend by sharing a secret about another. But this kind of bond feels hollow and rickety, like the little pig’s straw house, held together by lies, easily blown down by a single piece of information said out loud.
Sometimes we can get confused and throw out the privacy baby with the secrecy bathwater. These times, we might get all confessional, an impulse that asks for approval in exchange for too much information, as if the confessor doesn’t have rights to their own life. Too many years grappling with a guilty conscience and you can get wired to think everything of yours belongs to someone else.
But how do we know the difference between privacy and secrecy? How do we know what to keep as our own and what should be shared?
I could turn to external codes and mores to answer this question. But these, it seems to me, are too easily mutable. We might agree that lying is bad, but then there’s that thing called “Bro Code” that says that telling on a bro is a worse offense than lying. This route seems to get us caught up in who is who to whom, and what are worse offenses given the position of the offender and what they might want.
I prefer to turn to my body for the answer.
Privacy feels soft and rich and nourishing, like a quiet room of one’s own. It has the feel of a contemplative afternoon on a soft bed in a pool of sunlight. It’s a warm room that holds a deep wisdom, all the unsayable stuff that influences how you live your life.
This quiet room might hold a memory of reading Harriet the Spy with the smell of a wood-burning fireplace in the air. The memory doesn’t require anything nor seek any harm; somehow it nourishes you just by being.
Or it might hold the sensation of a first kiss, how it felt on your lips and in your toes, a feeling that is yours and yours alone. You can describe the kiss and the way the sky was bursting with stars that night, but no one can have access to your moment and enter it the way you live inside it, or it lives inside you.
If secrecy is a room, its door boasts a “Keep Out” sign. It needs the sign because the room is always under potential threat of someone entering. Often, someone else is in the room with you, and there are others you’ve locked out. A game of keep out and keep away.
Secrets can seduce us with the thrill of trespassing, of stealing. When we know something about someone that they don’t know themselves, we’ve stolen what’s theirs and gotten away with it.
We feel like a fool when we are the one who had a secret kept from us. When we find out, we look back at what we thought was real and re-see it The Sixth Sense-style. It shakes up what we thought we knew. It shakes our trust in the world, the ground suddenly gone from beneath our feet.
As dangerous as secrecy can be, it’s the easier temptation because privacy requires being able to sit in a room alone with ourselves. If we don’t respect ourselves, we constantly want to get out and lose ourselves in the company of others.
If we are insecure, another’s privacy might be hard for us to bear. What’s going on in that room we can’t enter? Respecting someone else’s privacy, especially a loved one’s, takes trust and faith and a willingness to say: I see you and know that there are depths I can’t reach and I honor that in you.
If we keep secrets from those we love, even with the best intention to “protect” them, we have decided for them what they do and do not need to know. We have taken away their agency and their ability to decide for themselves what to do in the face of the information denied them. If I keep something from you that is yours as much as it is mine, it means I choreograph our lives according to how I want things to go, what I think is best. You don’t even know that you didn’t have a say in things.
For me, there are few worse things than not being allowed to decide for myself what to do, how to live.
When we fill our private rooms with information that isn’t ours, when we cross the line and start to get shady, the intimacy that develops from a mutual honoring of one another’s privacy can become muted, lost behind a veil of secrets and lies.
Then secrets end up creating the opposite affect we intended: We may find ourselves, suddenly, alone in a club with no exit.
The most powerful love, I think, is built upon the recognition and honoring of the private space inside each of us. It’s the thing, after all, that drew us to our loved one to begin with—their mystery and depth. It’s a matter of saying: We are essentially alone, but let’s be alone together.
Stephanie writes short stories, non-fiction, and young adult fiction. She recently finished a young adult novel, "Edge of Seventeen," and is working on a memoir about her adventures as an ex-professor turned bartender. You can reach her at stephaniehop@gmail.com and follow her on Twitter @stephaniehop1.
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