Since my last post, where I considered secrets as translucency, I've been thinking about other metaphors and similes that I could use and have used in my writing of these posts to discuss secrets. Although I can think of a couple, I feel as if the most common is talking about how to keep a secret is to put something into a container.
Well, what kind of container? At first, I think of these little tupperware containers I have sitting in my fridge--the ones that separate hold certain foods to keep them all from spoiling immediately. Only a certain size secret can fit into these smaller containers, but as is the case with the losing battle in which I engage when I need to clean out the fridge and there are many containers with old food, the psychological containers we have for all of these tiny secrets and white lies begin to stack. Tupperware containers may sit there for a week, two, or three if there's not time to clean. Then we notice the lack of available space in the fridge and repeat the process of cleaning it out and filling it up again. But do we know our brains as well as we know our refrigerators? If you're like me, which for my own self-confidence and for the purpose of this blog we'll assume you are, then you've devoted far too little time over the course of your life to cleaning your mental refrigerator. And much of what we feel like we've done ourselves a favor by hiding from the rest of the world has since rotted.
Now, there's a reason why we chose to but somethings in these metaphorical containers in the first place. This is why they're called secrets...because we didn't want people to know about them. But when secrets become a burden is the point where we keep them--and they take up space that we could use to otherwise house newer and more pertinent secrets--when opportunities to address those in a constructive way are beginning to present themselves and we aren't taking them. In other words, the fridge starts to smell bad because of the old and nasty food and there isn't enough room to hold fresher secrets, which are more important in that moment of our lives to keep anyways.
So there are the small tupperware containers that the fridge holds, and then there is the shipyard full of our big, big storage containers. While the fridge remains closed until somebody decides it needs to be opened, the storage containers that we can compare our big secrets to are individually locked and oftentimes for good reasons. Sometimes they become more like vaults instead of containers, though. Do we really know what's happening inside? Can we access them to find out? These aren't just things we can forget about, even if we wanted to. These containers are big, heavy, voluminous and dark. But the way we limit these larger secrets to exposure to the outside world, preventing ourselves or others from unlocking the container door and bringing some light into this dark space, can also be quite dangerous if taken to an extreme.
An important characteristic is what the metaphor connotes as a whole in addition to the function of the individual words of or implied by the metaphor. "Container" has a fairly neutral connotation, but "closed", "sealed", "dark", "mask", "bury", and "under wraps" suggest things more forbidden and not so healthy to keep to oneself. That's certainly not to say that keeping secrets is a bad practice--it's a necessary one to maintain our private selves--but it is important to be aware of just what exactly we're containing and if we are missing the opportunities to healthily expose it.
