Boi Growing Up

What is it about our secrets that causes us to hide them from the world? In and of themselves, they are just bits of information. Snippets of knowledge belonging to a larger context. Knowledge has no description except it is attributed to something else. Why does information about ourselves invoke feelings? Does a stop sign being red make you feel ashamed? Worried? Aren’t our secrets, by technicality, the same likeness of the color of the sign?

Why then do we hide our “colors”?

First let us examine why we have secrets anyway. They are the things about us or what we have done that we aim to hide from others. Why the need to hide anything? Shame, disappointment, fear of consequences. We don’t add these components to the statement “the sun is hot”, but they almost immediately coincide with “I am 30lbs overweight”. Something personal gets infected with a feeling of shame, something impersonal gets to remain sterile.

What about “I work as a banker” versus “I work as a janitor”?

Now we get into differetiating between selective information. Both are just job titles. Both are personal. Why does one get a positive annotation and the other negative? You’d be ready to broadcast one and the other you’d feel the need to conceal it if you can. Why? What purpose does feeling badly toward something as mundane as facts do for yourself? ..it only causes pain and anxiety and a lower self-worth that I’ve observed.

But seriously, what causes this in the first place?

I really can’t figure it out for everyone, maybe I haven’t seen enough to give a concrete hypothesis, but I can maybe answer it from my point of view. Maybe a fear of rejection. No one likes to be pushed away because of something that’s been revealed bout them. That sucks. Possibly disappointing someone we care about? We tend to want to constantly measure ourselves up to what we think someone special wants us to be. We don’t actually know. We can’t actually know that standard, but we think we do and we don’t want to fail that.

If people weren’t so judgemental of other people, then we wouldn’t be judgemental of ourselves for fear of being subjected to that judgement.

My little brother really hit a soft spot in me today and it put this on my mind. Secrets are a dangerous thing. I put myself out there and he really crushed me a bit. I understand his explanation and what he’s feeling, but it still hurt some. Hidden information that’s been revealed changes things. It always will. Up until we no longer judge and scrutinize a person on what they are.

I do and always will continue to form an opinion of a person based on what they do.

This has been a long day. I definitely have more questions than I thought.

Til next time. Stay frosty.