When I began thinking about blogging, I also began wondering if I had the confessional ability to spark something in other people, to move them in the same ways that I’ve been moved by other people’s writing. Some of the things I’ve come across in blogs have had such heartbreaking candor or humor (or poignancy, or, or, or…) that they go beyond just grabbing your attention and move into the realm of taking your attention by the neck in its dirty hands and wrestling it into submission on the ground. When that happens to me, it’s because someone has found an evocative way to talk about a subject that is deeply personal to him or her. At the end of the telling, I want to rest my hand on theirs. They’ve shared.
I, on the other hand, am not someone who shares easily. I’m friendly and relatively outgoing, but for the most part I’d really rather listen to other people talk about their stuff. I like to soak in their stories, absorb the little pieces that make them a whole person. I’m often amazed and sometimes a little envious of people’s ability to expose themselves emotionally or intellectually, how beautiful and simple it can be to ask others to look instead of waiting for them to dig. It takes a long time to get to know me, and even longer to find out anything definitive enough to aid in understanding me. I’m not aloof. I relay facts and anecdotes, slip hints, leave breadcrumbs.
I think we humans take delight in secrets, whether our own, or those belonging to others. My own absorption with the narrative of other people’s lives is like being in on a secret, one that I can guard and hold in cupped hands, delighting in its effect. Even the most mundane secret will do. This is why we read blogs or books, watch movies, listen to music. We’re looking for a truth in each of these things, something of our own stories just as much as a shared experience of someone else’s. I treat my own secrets much differently. Perhaps because I already know them so well, they are more difficult to handle and keep in perspective. Offering them unsolicited seems at best presumptuous, and at worst unsafe. Sharing one’s secrets, however mundane, is tantamount to revealing the soft underbelly where all vulnerability and insecurity is stored.
But there reaches a point where the desire to share, to be known and to reconcile what can be observed by others with its foundations, becomes more powerful than the ability to keep one’s own confidences. The need to convey all the secrets, mundane and dramatic, funny and serious, those of deep import and those inconsequential, becomes stronger than fear or pride or any of the other things that keep us from doing what we find we need to do. So we confess. And hope that someone holds our secret in cupped hands.