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.

I’m thinking, today, about sensitivity. Not the kind that makes you cry upon seeing a particularly poignant cat food commercial (and besides, I think that’s called PMS), but the kind that makes your hackles go up. I think we’ve all experienced this. You meet someone. You don’t like them. Or, you may find them charming, but can’t shake the feeling that there’s something not quite right about them. They are going to cause drama and you’re reluctant to have them near you. Don’t quite trust them. That’s the kind of sensitivity I’m talking about.

I think there are times in our lives when we’re totally in tune with the sensations caused by this sort of sensitivity. Childhood, for example. We are at our most basic, and at the same time, our most attuned to self preservation instincts. It’s how we learn. As we mature, we turn down the volume on the cacophony of messages about things we just seem to “know”, and behave more rationally. It’s no coincidence that during that same period of time, we start making messes, hurt ourselves, hurt other people, and generally feel confused and disjointed. It’s where we seem to pick up our self-inflicted baggage and only after the first decade or so of adulthood is over do you start to come out of the haze of learned behaviors, and starting relying again on things that you just know.

Developing my own sensitivity to those things that I know is an exercise sometimes. It seems that we disregard the instinctual so often that it’s dulled past the point of usefulness. But it can surprise you. It pokes out like a prairie dog from a burrow to let you know that’s something’s up. There’s something you need to watch for. “They” say that when a woman is in her 30s, she really begins to come into her own. A contention that, admittedly, I’d been pretty quick to dismiss as bullshit. But now that I’m well there, I’m a little more willing to give it some credence. Being able to integrate my inherent sensitivity into the other ways of behaving that I’ve been taught has turned out to be incredibly, well, helpful. I am now the proud inhabitant of a drama-free life.