Keeping Secrets

It's crazy how people want us to help them do things that they can't do for us.

_{Photo by Roberto Tumini}

I've said it here in the past that I happen to be someone who people tend to open up to. I don't know why but my friends naturally get this feeling that I'm someone they can trust, I think that is why they most times open up to me and tell me some of their deepest secrets, these are things that if made public will bring shame and embarrassment to them.

And being the kind of guy that I am, I try my possible best never to think about those things again after that day. I make sure that those things doesn't affect the way I interact with that person in the future because I don't want them to feel like I'm judging them because of something they told me that they did in the past, and so far I've never had such problems.

Unfortunately, one of the side effects being the secret guy has on me is that it makes me trust less and so I tend to keep things to myself because being the guy with everyone's secret just gives you a better knowledge of how easy you could destroy ones life and seeing how I don't want that happening to me, I decided it was best I kept my shit to myself.

But then I started to think about the whole thing later and it started to feel like I was overthinking the whole thing. People tell people stuff because it helps reduce the burden they may feel and there might come a time where I might want to do that. So I decided to give it a try, I started to tell one of my friends things about me. Of course it was nothing too crazy that was capable of ruining my life or causing any damage to me if it got out (I still had my trust issue), it was just some stuff about me that if I hadn't told him, he wouldn't have known about it, so it basically was news to him.

And seeing how everyone rarely gets anything new to say about me (because I make sure to control what people know and don't know about me), this felt like top secret to him.

I remember it felt great for a while, having someone you could tell stuff, but then I began to panic and worry about him telling other people, but like I said, this were things that would cause no harm to me if it got out, so it didn't take long for me to calm myself and just as I got calm, it got out.

It turned out that the friend I had picked wasn't a realible one afterall. He had told someone everything and that someone had mentioned it to me in a bid to confirm if what he heard was true (he probably told me about it because he didn't think of the matter as a secret and felt it was something I would want to talk about, seeing how I already told someone else about it in the first place). When I approached my friend about it, he had told me that he didn't know it was meant to be a secret. Maybe he was right, maybe I should have emphasised on that rather than just assume that everyone has the common sense to know when someone is giving you privileged information about themselves.

Anyways, I'm back to my old self, no more sharing secrets from me because honestly, it's a dumb thing to do. Why tell someone something you know they can use against you or to control you in the future, why? That's like you giving someone a very lethal weapon and praying that they don't use it against you.