I speak a lot about friends in this blog. There are very few real constants in my life but the friends that I have are one of them. I tend to be a very nostalgic person. I may go back and forth on my feelings about my friends -- get tired of being with them during my pushing away phases -- but their presence is as necessary as air or water to me. It's funny how those tides ebb and flow. At some times one or another of my friends are more important to me. Sometimes I need a certain person's sort of personality to help me through things. Sometimes I need a straight shooter and sometimes I need someone who'll just patiently sit and let me lay my troubles down at their feet. Sometimes I need someone who'll just let me bitch, and sometimes I need someone to slap some sense into me. I use up so much of my good friend karma that I worry if there's a finite amount and I'm eventually going to get to the bottom of the karmic barrel. That's why it pleases me so much to give back to my friends that are in need. I usually feel so selfish and needy and demanding, and the times that I can support a friend who needs a shoulder makes me feel like I'm righting the balance.
I was asked a question recently; why do people feel a need to share secrets? What drives people towards revelation?
I think (as in everything) there are a number of reasons, all of equal value and weight.
Every one of us has experienced carrying a secret thought or belief or aspect of our personality around inside our heads. Perhaps it is a deed, or the thought of a deed, or merely a realization that your own thoughts are incongruous or contradictory to what your abstraction of "right" is. Perhaps it is something caught up in phrases that you say to yourself, the what you wants and what you needs arguing with the what you shoulds and what you ought's. The practice of regression and denial. All of us are so busy trying to be that we forget about being.
I'm talking about our Shadow Self. Carl Jung defined it as "that which we think we are not" and personally, I think it's one of the most potent aspects of the human psyche. I've thought about that wolf lurking at the fringes of my own psyche for many years now but have only recently begun to tempt it forward. I’m growing more and more certain that tempting it was the best thing for me to do. Believe it or not, I haven’t felt so much like myself in years.
But back to sharing confidences. It’s not that surprising, really. If you carry something around long enough you have trouble seeing it. You go over and over and over it to yourself and try to approach it from every angle but in the end you know you're only able to look at it from one perspective; your own. It loses its sense of otherness to you and begins to be something you’re unable to distinguish from what was before. There is only so much introspection one can conduct before the sound of your own inner voice begins to drone in your ears.
Besides, sharing burdens alone -- secret thoughts, confusing feelings, loves and hates and inadequacies -- is frightening. It makes you feel totally alone in your own head. They say that troubling feelings and thoughts are amorphous, without weight or being, but anyone who’s ever carried one around knows what a lie that is. They are heavy. You feel their presence inside you like something pushing up against the cage of your skin. I know a few people who clutch those sorts of feelings to themselves and feel like it gives them a unique sense of control and power but for the most part the opposite is true. There’s only so long one of those things can live inside you before you have to break its hold, even momentarily. You give it more and more power over you the longer you let it remain bottled up.
That’s not to say that one needs to go willy-nilly talking about everything inside their skull. By no means. It does mean that one should take the internal time to analyze and learn from the things that rise from within before allowing them a bit of breathing space. It does mean that when you choose to let it out, the choice you make – meaning who you show it to – says more about how you feel about someone than pretty much anything else I can think of. It is the ultimate form of love and trust.
To find that someone has placed ultimate trust in me -- and by doing so, express so very plainly how significant I am to them -- means more to me than I can express. It is an intimacy that rivals sex and often bests it. It is longer lasting, more constant and unwavering, and exists unfettered by the complex mixed signals that two physical bodies can send. It simply is.
Each time you are trusted with something it becomes part of who you are. The person that entrusts it to you realizes that it could change the way you view him or her and so when they choose to reveal themselves to you in such a raw unvarnished manner, it is an honor. I take it as such and give it the recognition it deserves. That sort of truth -- the warts and all kind -- is such a rare commodity that when it's given it needs to be appreciated. Yes, learning things changes how you view someone. It might change for the worse but that is not the fault of the benefactor. It is the responsibility of the beneficiary to choose whether it is more important that you maintain your idea of the person you know, or whether you accept the person for what they actually are. It gives you the opportunity to allow someone else’s shadow to step into your light. Push your own friends' shadows out if you want to, but my friend’s shadows can always walk with me. I have plenty of room to spare.
((Song: "Nothing Else Matters" by Metallica. Lyrics here:
http://www.digitaldreamdoor.com/pages/lyrics2/noth-else-mat.html))
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