Secrets Aren’t a Girls Best Friend

Secrets aren’t my favorite.

By nature I’m definitely inclined to provide more information rather than less. I want to make sure everyone who would appreciate an invite has one, everyone who is affected to be notified, everyone who has an opinion to have a chance to voice it. I want to have and provide as much data as possible so we can all make our best decisions. I want to share how I’m feeling and what happened because I want to feel understood.

I know not everyone is like this, and I know there are even good reasons for withholding information sometimes, but its a constant battle for me to not share things with people I think would appreciate knowing, especially when the secret isn’t especially black or white.

If someone explicitly tells me not to tell their secret of course I won’t break that. But lately I’ve been faced with more of the ambiguous kinds of secrets, the kind that I think will end up hurting more people if kept quiet too long. And I’m a bit frustrated that I keep ending up in a position where I have to toe this line.

Our company is in the process of acquiring another smaller company and my boss (a slightly suspicious, conspiracy theory type guy) has been SUPER shady about what and when and how we tell the new guys about things that are going on. I get that some things are delicate, and that we need to protect our interests, but if we’re going to work with and trust these people I’m inclined to start off on good terms and be transparent. Sure, we’re not sure what salary we can promise, but telling them that we’re still working it out is better than letting them think they’re covered and then pulling the rug out at the last minute.

And when he tried to casually tell me that the contractor I’ve been working with every day for the last two months got a new job and starts in two days, I was completely, unnecessarily betrayed. He’d known for a month about this change and didn’t have a good reason for keeping it from me (other than general shadyness which then makes me question other things…). And while I always knew this contractor was going to leave us so that isn’t a big deal, to be told at the last minute felt like I’d been slapped in the face.

All this work drama isn’t new (and its actually been surprisingly okay since I almost quit two weeks ago). What is new is that these moral dilemmas about who and when to tell have creeped into my personal life, and I’m exhausted from handling it.

While scrolling through Facebook in November I saw a post from my friend’s ex-boyfriend (who everyone hates and her family has banned from holiday dinners) that he was excited to be a father with my friend. I haven’t been close with this friend in a while so my first instinct was to ask her best friend if it was true. I know now I should have gone to my pregnant friend directly, but when I didn’t we realized that she hadn’t told anyone that she was even with him again, much less that she was excited to be a mom. I talked it over directly with my friend a week later and pleaded with her to tell her family because if I was hurt to find out the way I did, and if her friend was hurt to find out the way she did, I knew it would crush her family to find out from anyone other than their daughter, especially since the guy isn’t their favorite.

But instead of just owning up to the situation that she was in, my friend completely avoided any responsibility or action, and has just become more and more reclusive from her friends and family – delaying telling them until the last possible instant, even telling lies. I get that you don’t have to tell people things right away, but when some people know and some don’t and you’re causing more drama than not, just own up!

I obviously have hated it, but its her life and she’s allowed to hurt other people. It has just made me want less to do with her in any capacity, much less be involved with her secrets. So when a few of her friends reached out to me last week for help telling her parents about the baby (3 months later, 4 months pregnant) I was reluctant to even respond, and there was no way I was going to actively get involved even more.

They said that she’d had a complication and that she’d been in the hospital the night before but was now at home resting. They partially wanted to let her family know because they thought it was the right thing to do, and partially because they were all at the same point I had gotten to earlier – they were done keeping her secrets and being treated poorly by someone who wouldn’t be forthcoming about anything. They wanted to hand off the weight of that responsibility.  It was heartbreaking to hear what I’d been feeling from the people I’d hoped she trusted more than me. Especially because every one of us would have been fine to keep quiet or help if she’d just been honest that she didn’t know what was going to happen next but told us where she was at now. Instead all of us, her included, were stuck in this unknown limbo of pain and confusion.

I’m trying really hard to hold my ground and not get involved, so I told them that if they really wanted to help they’d show up at her door with food and just sit with her, and after to listening to their frustrations they agreed it was the best thing to do.

I’m not sure of the details (I’M TRYING TO STAY OUT OF IT), but I know that a few days later she lost the baby and that her parents know now, but I just keep coming back to the idea that so much pain and confusion and fear could have been avoided by a few honest sentences.

Speaking of a few honest sentences, a few weeks ago one of my high school friends called to tell me that our male mutual friend had casually mentioned ‘you guys all know I’m gay right’ in passing to her and a few of our friends over Christmas break. He said he’d told his mother and sister (our close friend) last year and that he’d assumed they’d all told us.

The fact that he’s gay isn’t all that surprising, and I get that its his choice if he’s wanted to wait this long to talk openly about it, but by finding out a secret that could have been building for years it has opened up all these other issues and questions that I’m honestly quite overwhelmed by.

Who else has known and kept it from me? How long has he kept it from me? Did his mother and sister purposely decide not to tell me/others? Who can I tell? Who should I tell? Maybe he wants us to tell so he doesn’t have to? Are we not close enough friends that he could have told me this directly? Did I ever say something to offend him because I didn’t know? Why tell now? When will it be common knowledge?

Luckily I’d had practice with secret unwinding recently so I handled this better than I had my pregnant friend, by just keeping my mouth shut while I dealt with all these questions and figured out how to move forward. I called him directly to catch up and mend any fears I had about us not being close friends (we didn’t talk about it), I didn’t ask the friend who told me any follow up questions so it wouldn’t gain any momentum or drama, and I reminded myself that I’ve offended him countless other times in our friendship over other things and this is no different.

After a few weeks I decided it was safe to bring it up to my mother (who is the queen of secret keeping) and knows him well. I first gave her the option of knowing or not knowing and she was relieved when I told her my predicament (at least I wasn’t pregnant!).

Of course, it turned out she’d already known, his mother told a few of her friends who had told her at a dinner party 6 months earlier, and while I was grateful that some of the secret responsibility was now lifted from my heart, I was also kind of hurt by her that she hadn’t told me.

What I’m trying to get at in this whole post is that I understand that keeping secrets is necessary and even right sometimes, but it also can be hurtful and annoying and detrimental. It isn’t the end of the world that my mother kept a secret from me or that my boss makes things harder than they have to be, but eventually all this does add up. I’m just bewildered by this complex process of keeping and sharing secrets, and trying to find the balance seems to be more work than it’s worth.