“Three may keep a secret, if two of them are dead.”
- Benjamin Franklin
Everyone has a secret that they are holding deep down inside of them. Whether it is about you secretly getting engaged, or if it is about someone you have a crush on; we all have secrets. The thing that I don’t understand about secrets is, why we feel the need to share them. As if it isn’t enough for ourselves to know our own secret, we feel the need to tell one or two other people. At that point, I don’t think it is a secret anymore because you told someone else. Secrets are secret for a reason. It is understandable that the weight that you are carrying from that secret may have become too much for you to bear, so you just had to tell. I get it. Keeping things to yourself is hard. The problem is when you involve other people, however, you then are starting to have less control on who you want to know your secret. Maybe the first person you told your secret to was trustworthy, but the second, and third, and so on might not be.
I guess as human beings we were not designed to keep anything secret. Maybe people view keeping secrets from other people as lying, because they are not telling the whole truth. I know, I for one am guilty of not keeping my own secrets and putting trust into the hands of other people. Which is something anyone with that fault needs to work on.
Here are a few guidelines to reference if you do have a secret:
Write it down on a piece of paper.
Now you and the paper know. That’s two people already.
Record yourself saying the secret.
When you do this, be sure not to let anyone hear it.
Tell a random stranger.
A literal random stranger that is passing you by on the sidewalk. Tell them your secret. That way, they don’t know you, you don’t know them. Everything is golden.
Don’t tell anyone.
The most obvious way for your secret to never get out is for you to never speak of something that is supposed to be secretive.
The lesson from this, is to just be mindful who you let know your secrets!