A few years back I began thinking about my closets and the secrets that I kept. I’m not talking about sexual closets, I’m talking straight up about secrets because ultimately that’s what “the closet” is about. It’s about keeping something secret that you don’t want anyone else to know. But the real question I had to ask myself was; Am I keeping this secret from others or am I trying to keep it from myself? Am I trying to forget something that happened in my life that I wasn’t willing to confront?
Secrets can be easy to keep, but they can eat away at you in ways you never dreamed possible. These are the things in your life that you would Photoshop out of your life if you could, but you can’t – so you hide them. One person might say that they had a secret abortion or another person might say their secret was being molested. One person’s secret is not harder than any other, they are relative to that individual and they are just simply “hard”.
The most important thing when it comes to dealing with your secrets and learning to understand yourself is to confront your secrets head on. What are they? Why are you keeping them a secret? I am not saying that you should go and reveal your secrets, that is your choice. What I am saying is that you should sit down, write your secrets down – you may shred them afterward, but first stand back and ask yourself;
- Why is it important that I keep this secret? Is it how I may be perceived by my friends, my family or my public image?
- Is it to protect someone else? Does that person deserve to be protected or should they be confronted about the secret?
- Is it to protect my job?
- Is it to keep from losing someone close to me? And is my relationship with this person healthy if I can’t reveal this secret?
These are all questions that I confronted when I began to think about some of my own secrets and I kept coming back to a singular thought. Regardless of what the secret was or why I was choosing to keep it a secret and from whom, I needed to be authentic to myself. I needed to come to the realization that this is a part of who I am and face that fact.
The thing to remember about your secrets and being authentic is that people’s problems with your secrets are not your problems. They are their problems and their problem with how they perceive the world around themselves or perhaps their problem with their relationship with you. You are who you are and your secrets are not lies, they are simply something that is a part of yourself that you are choosing not to share with others. As long as you can be authentic, be genuine to yourself. Once you learn to be authentic to yourself, you will find it is much easier to be genuine to the people around you and they will start to see who the real you is and either accept it or deny it, but most importantly – it will be you.