Oregon Humanities Spring/Summer 2007

Cover of Oregon Humanities Spring/Summer 2007
Kathleen Holt
EDITOR
Jennifer Viviano
GRAPHIC DESIGN
Leigh van der Werff
PUBLICATIONS ASSISTANT
Allison Dubinsky
COPY EDITOR
Editorial Advisory Board
Tom Booth
Brian Doyle
Debra Gwartney
Julia Heydon
Marianne Keddington-Lang
Guy Maynard
Win McCormack
Camela Raymond
Kate Sage
Linny Stovall
Rich Wandschneider
Curt Yehnert

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Don't Ask, Don't Tell

In praise of the private life

By Jennifer Allen

You might call it love at first refusal. About a year ago, I fell head over heels for a man who refused to tell me a secret. We were in the midst of a raucous party in a high-ceilinged, echoing loft, and had hit it off instantly. As the evening went on, the voices swelled around us, so we leaned in close to talk. Somewhere in our conversation, he'd mentioned something in passing that piqued my curiosity. I tried at first to ignore it, but in the end couldn't resist and asked what I realize now was a presumptuous question given that we had known each other for just a few hours. He easily could have brushed off my question with a glib response or even lied. Instead, he told me, quite affably but in no uncertain terms, that the answer was private and that he was not going to answer my question, not there, not then.

I was immediately taken with him--but taken aback as well. I am nosy by nature--as a child, I was a shameless snoop, always looking for clues about people, before I understood the mystery of their private selves. As an adult, I seek permission for my curious questions and tend to get the green light more often than not. My dismay in that moment made me realize how rarely my prying is met with rejection. And it started me thinking about secrets more generally and the fact that we don't keep enough of them.

As a culture, we have a tendency to share too much. At best, our tell-all tendencies are rooted in a rejection of the solitary suffering that some secrets cause--a quick perusal of postsecret.com demonstrates poignant moments of catharsis. At worst, though, we are a society saturated with secrets offered unbidden and to no one's benefit: on reality TV programs, on confessional daytime talk shows, and in autobiographies by celebrities barely out of their teens. The question of quality aside, this vast quantity of unveiled secrets is creating a sort of fetishization of truth, as if experiences are made real by, and only have value in, their telling.

I can't help but wonder what is lost with all these divulgences, with this disintegration of the boundary between what is private and what is public. Aren't our private thoughts and experiences essentially what define us as individuals? It seems to me that our confessional culture, our habits of hyper-communication and self-revelation, are quietly chipping away at our very concept of a private life.

Simply put, I worry that we are giving too much of ourselves away. We only control our secrets, these private parts of ourselves, so long as we don't speak them or put them in writing. Only in this context of absolute privacy are they wholly ours. In these private spaces, our experiences become most powerful because with reflection, we imbue them with meaning. Disclosing details of our private lives is an important way we come to know each other--when we share our secrets, we can create intimacy with someone we trust. But if we fail to first try to make sense of a secret for ourselves and instead quickly confide it, that intimacy is, at best, compromised.

I have a friend who narrates his life constantly via cell phone and e-mail. I know the rhythms of his workday--his lunch plans, his boss's unreasonable requests. And I know the rhythms of his personal life: he forwards the tortured e-mails from his ex, replays for me the snarky voice-mail from a mutual friend, and sends me text messages while his date is in the bathroom. What is he signaling to me with all of this information? Are the stories he's sharing worth the time he's lost, the silent moments during which he might have had an epiphany, a second thought, or a few minutes of contemplation? These undigested divulgences haven't helped me know my friend in a more intimate way. What's more, I think something is lost to him in transferring his experiences so immediately from the private to the public domain before giving them a second thought. If he kept his secrets, even if only for a little while longer, might he understand his choices and his reactions more deeply?

My friend, like many of us, has also fallen victim to the lure of technology, which seduces us into habits of constant communication--into giving away our secrets too readily and in too raw a form. E-mail, cell phones, and instant messaging make it all too easy to share our thoughts and experiences in the heat of the moment, before we've had time to think twice. The immediacy and efficiency of these new mediums are wearing away our patience for second thoughts, our willingness to reflect on our own experiences and to allow others to do the same. I notice that I have an increasingly difficult time switching off my phone to sit with a struggle, to puzzle anything out in solitude.

What's more, though our secrets and our private experiences define us, we also have the power to define them. And as soon as we share a secret, we sacrifice the discretion to define it. Once a secret has entered the public domain, we feel compelled to incorporate our confidante's response and interpretation into our understanding of our own experience. Our secret--that experience or memory or tiny, titillating fact--is before us in rough paraphrase from someone else's lips, and it is no longer solely ours. It is difficult enough that technology has transformed how we think of privacy and of the spaces that once were private--a solitary walk in the park or my house at midnight as I write: perhaps we should keep our secrets safe for longer in the truly private space of our own minds.

Of course, I don't mean to suggest that secrets are always best kept, or even that we always need to know what we feel before we speak. I don't envision a world in which everything we say to each other is carefully rehearsed before it's articulated, as in Wordsworth's famous definition of poetry as arising from "emotions recollected in tranquility." What he describes first--"the spontaneous overflow of powerful feelings," sharing our raw emotions, transgressions, or rough ideas--is a beautiful way that we show ourselves to one another. I only suggest that we try to strike a balance and keep in mind the value of both kinds of communication.

Secrets are not simply facts withheld. Pieces of information as diverse as a social security number, a tremulous hope, or an illicit affair, are all secrets not just because their revelation, but their very existence, increases the secret keeper's vulnerability in one way or another. Because of this, secrets can be powerful forces for isolating us, for connecting us, and for helping us make sense of our lives and our choices. This power of secrets, to both harm and help us, demands our respect and our careful consideration. As the poet William Stafford reminds us in "A ritual to read to each other,"

And so I appeal to a voice, to something shadowy,

a remote important region in all who talk:

though we could fool each other, we should consider--

lest the parade of our mutual life get lost in the dark.

For it is important that awake people be awake,

or a breaking line may discourage them back to sleep;

the signals we give--yes, no, or maybe--

should be clear: the darkness around us is deep.

When we speak before thinking and share more of ourselves than we know we should, we devalue our own experience and miss an opportunity to make meaning of our lives on our own, before inviting others to weigh in. It is the care we take with our own privacy that gives secrets their value, both for our private understanding of ourselves, and the intimacy of those times when we confide in, or earn the confidence of, others.

In the end, my love-at-first-refusal relationship didn't last. But that moment of being told "no," of witnessing one man's assertion of a private self in the midst of that raucous room, stuck with me. It has taken me some time to realize that moment's significance in my memory and in our relationship: he knew then something I'm only just beginning to understand now--that secrets are a currency of sorts, and how we exchange them can help or hinder our self-awareness and affect the depth of our relationships. The trust that ultimately developed between us was stronger not only because of the secrets we shared, but also because of the ones we allowed each other to keep.

Published in the Spring/Summer 2007 issue of Oregon Humanities.

© 2007 Oregon Council for the Humanities