You have probably heard this said several times in your life. “Don’t tell anyone, but dash dash dash,” or “This is in confidence, no one else knows, so please don’t share it ...” And before you can even cover your ears and run, you are drawn into some minor or major secret from someone else’s life.
What can you do?
It has already been whispered or said aloud in your ear. It may be a juicy tidbit about someone you instinctively never had time for and it serves as another nail in the coffin of your dislike; or it could be a huge revelation about someone you always admired and looked up to; or it could be something innocuous about a third party, someone on the periphery of your life and really too trivial for you to care about — but it is now firmly ensconced in your mind and it begins to eat its way in and then pop up from time to time like a worm that will not rest.
What several of us resort to is whispering that secret to someone else. We begin with those same words, “Don’t tell anyone, this is a secret ...” and we don’t stop to consider that it is no longer a secret if we are busy repeating it.
Others among us take the high road and zip our lips, batten down the hatches and keep the “secret” safely locked up — and then suddenly one day we hear it announced in a family gathering or in a group of friends!
“What? Who told you that?” we say, horrified that something so well guarded and whispered to us in a tête-à-tête in the confines of our home has managed to get out. Did we talk in our sleep? Did we let it slip somehow? But no, it is not us. And thanks to that very forthcoming person who made the announcement, we learn the source of her/his information: often the same person who swore us to secrecy in the first place!
As a child, I was a great listener — and this did not mean that I provided a sympathetic ear to my friends. No, I listened to everything that went on around me and since I had the dubious advantage of a blank, uncomprehending expression as I sucked industriously on my thumb, speakers and conversationalists of all ages did not watch what they were saying around me. “How much will little Dumbo in the corner understand?” is probably what they thought — and thus I came to possess quite a bit of information about my older siblings, cousins, aunts and uncles, and even visitors and workers who came to the house.
Of course, after processing all that I had heard (and yes, a lot of it fell through the cracks, luckily for those siblings and cousins and others), I didn’t keep the information to myself.
Everything was reported to Mother. She, fortunately for me, never revealed her sources when she acted on anything I had carried to her. But eventually, others were able to put two and two together and arrive at the obvious answer, I earned the title of the news broadcasting corporation that was best-known at the time, and lips began to get sealed when I was around.
In time, thankfully, I outgrew my propensity to spill the beans on everyone and learned to be circumspect about what I repeated, and thereafter understood that the least offensive path was just to file away, or better still, forget whatever I was told in confidence or heard by accident.
Of course, in the way of all secrets, nothing stays hidden forever — but do we really need to play a pivotal role in making those personal secrets available to all?
Cheryl Rao is a journalist based in India.
