Everyone has secrets. Most people may only consider them to be simply things that they wish to keep private. Secrets, for the most part, are a good thing. Everyone needs to have a portion of themselves hidden from the world. That piece is just for them and no one else. Without secrets we would be wandering around fully exposed, almost like being naked.
I know there are couples out there who say that they tell each other everything. That they have no secrets. There are also people who say that they have nothing to hide. While that may be mostly true, everyone has something they don't or won't share with anyone. It could be some fear, a dark fantasy, an embarrassing event from the past, or something that no one else could possibly understand. Whatever it is, there can be a bit of comfort knowing that it's yours. On the flip side there can be a bit of anxiety that someone may find out about it. If someone learns our secrets there is that fear of being judged. No one really wants to be judged by someone else and yet we all do it to other people. It's in our nature. I suppose the trick is realizing that in many cases it doesn't matter what someone else thinks, it only matters what you think. So you like hardcore goat porn. You secretly cheated on a significant other at some point in a relationship. The end of the bachelor party ended up with someone being buried in the Nevada desert. OK that last one was probably pretty bad, but we tend to hide things that don't need to be hidden. Our secrets are probably trivial to other people, at least after the initial shock of hearing them. I think part of the problem with revealing a secret is that you've forever exposed a piece of yourself. It's out there and can never be hidden again. And once it's out there it's hard to say how it will change things.
Now not all secrets are harmless. Even in the examples I listed there could be some serious consequences. In a lot of situations it's unknown how someone may react to hearing secret information. That sense of unknown often leads to irrational fear. Or maybe very reasonable fear based on whatever that secret is. People have murdered in order to hide a lesser crime. At that moment it made more sense to kill someone that allow for the possibility that their secret would be exposed. Blackmail is based on the assumption that someone is so scared about something getting out that they'll continue to pay for peace of mind. The problem with blackmail is that you're never buying peace of mind, you're only renting it. It becomes a question of how far you'd go to keep something private.
It makes me wonder if keeping something secret is a form of lying. One could argue that by omitting certain pieces of information, you're in fact lying. If I don't share something does it automatically mean it's private? At what point does the unspoken transform into a secret? I guess it would only become a secret if you consciously made an effort to keep someone from finding out about it. Keeping a secret requires some bit of deception. Everyone has heard the phrase "honesty is the best policy". It's usually said by someone who is naive. I'm not saying honesty is bad, but there are so many situations where being honest doesn't help, in fact it does just the opposite. Now in several cases you should stick with the truth, if only for the simple fact that it's usually the easiest thing to remember.
The thing is that everyone lies. The size and depth of the lie varies, but we've all done it at some point and will do it again. And not all lies are bad. Some are necessary. Where would we be if we always told the truth? Although there is a difference between being honest and simply saying whatever it is you're thinking. Sometimes it's best to say nothing and when that's not an option, you go with what will cause the least amount of damage.
George said "It's not a lie if you believe it", which I always thought was a funny thing to say because it's probably the worst of all lies. You've started to delude yourself into believing something false. I would imagine everyone lies to themselves from time to time. We try to convince ourselves of something we know not to be true, but because we think it, it might in fact become true for us. Before I've talked about how perception shapes memory and in turn reality. A lie can become the truth for us if there is nothing to contradict it. In that regard the lie about the truth has become our secret that we keep from ourselves.
