“Here’s some advice about keeping secrets: it’s a lot easier if you don’t know this in the first place.” —Alan Turing, The Imitation Game
Well, in case you do know your secrets, let me give you some perhaps more applicable advice.
Knowing your secrets can absolutely be a burden. If there’s anybody who understands this, it’s the 17-year old boy writing this blog. But since the very first post of this blog, when I turned a burden into an advantage–a relief–I have been a strong believer in the notion that our secrets can be equally as empowering as they can be dangerous. Yes, they can be empowering in the sense that if we know something about another person that the rest if the world doesn’t we can use those secrets for ill to manipulate that person. This is true of stories in general…that they can be used to malign. What I actually mean, though, is that the secrets we keep can be used for good. To help people. To connect with somebody that feels more alone than they should be. To change the course of , well, just about anything we want.
On a slightly different note, I find myself wondering about what the secret is. What is that all-fitting key, the golden ticket, the magic bullet that will help us all succeed. Sorry to disappoint, but I cannot possibly write for you in a couple of lines something that might satiate the curiosity I may have just provoked in you. I’ll give it my best shot, anyhow.
The secret to the game we call life, at least in my opinion, is to do whatever it takes to leave the world a better place than you entered it. Before continuing, I should point out a flaw in that sentence. Instead of trying hard with little success to make the world a better place in a variety of aspects, pick something that has been an important part of your experiences—something that, left out, would alter the purpose of your story or kind of story you tell—and think of ways to improve it for the next person.
I am going to toot my own horn for a couple of sentences. Doing so for longer than that would be a waste of precious time for you and for me. I recently coordinated a presentation on the importance of including LGBT-specific sexual education into our schools’ Health Education curricula. Without using this blog as another means of getting my ideas across about why it is so important that this curricular change occurs, I’ll explain how this went from secret to successful in my mind.
Last year, when friends of mine from the student newspaper and I had just started talking about this issue, I was still in the closet. I was scared and, frankly, pissed that there were people even considering not allowing this curricular change to occur. As I had conversations about it with more and more people, and better understood that people were open to discussion around issues like this one that pertained to the LGBTQ+ community, I became more and more comfortable in my own skin. I also began to realize that I was somebody who not only had a voice I was willing to use for good, but I also had a perspective few others did that could make that voice more than good. That perspective came from secrets I had been carrying around with me. What I formerly viewed as baggage, I then began to understand that same baggage as a sort of weapon. And I grew increasingly passionate about seeing this discussion turn into something more tangible, more meaningful, than I imagined it could be a year ago. Indeed, I acted upon that passion, and did something that was important for my own personal goals, but that will hopefully make a difference of students after me.
Not all secrets are meant to be used. Know that. For each individual, a different set of judgment calls occur with respect to what we choose to lay out on the table and what we don’t. That being said, remember that secrets are only damaging to us if we take a passive or even frightened approach to dealing with them. On the contrary, they can play a pivotal role in helping to improve our own lives and the lives of those who come after us if we choose to confront them, converting them into a part of our stories that empowers us.
