If You're Afraid of Telling the Truth

she looked absolutely haunted, poor thing

A former friend of mine—an emotionally abusive one—said many incorrect and hurtful things over the course of our friendship, but one of the ones that turned out to be accurate was this: I am a secretive person.

A secretive person is not the same thing as a private person, which is a distinction that I learned from the actor Andrew Scott. A private person may not shout everything about themselves and their lives from the rooftops, but they may have a circle of friends who know what the public doesn’t. A secretive person has things about themselves that they hoard in their little caves. A secretive person is afraid of what will happen if people know. A secretive person defends their secrets. There are things that they may never tell anyone until they die.

This former friend hated that I was secretive, in large part because they were the polar opposite of secretive. We once disagreed because, while sitting next to one another in bed, I looked away when they were typing their password into their laptop, and this upset them—upset this person who would, they said, give me access to all of their passwords and every image on their camera roll, which was to say that because I wouldn’t, I was creating inequality in our relationship.

At first, I disagreed. I didn’t think of myself as a secretive person. In fact, my “brand” tends to be that of someone who is rather open about her life; I even wrote a best-selling book in large part about some of the most vulnerable elements of my life. But as time passed, and after we stopped being friends, I realized this person was right about me. I’d thought I was transparent; in fact, I was and am. But not about everything.

Unsurprisingly, I followed the path backward and saw that this tendency originated in childhood. The abuse that I experienced was a secret, and when my mother found evidence of it, I was told to keep that a secret. When I grew older and moved out of my childhood home, I found that to not be secretive placed me in peril again and again until secrecy had dug its claws into me and made itself a habit.

I keep diaries. I have a therapist, to whom I tell almost everything, but I never tell anyone everything, and perhaps no one does. I doubt it. The world is too dangerous to make oneself completely vulnerable—so I believe, at least, whether or not it’s true.

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Do you consider yourself secretive or private? Why do you think that is? Are you happy with your identity as that kind of person, or would you rather be different?