(Photo: mr.babies2)
When I was 8 or 9 years old, I was playing at a friend’s house. I went to the kitchen to ask for a glass of water and the next thing I knew I was sitting at the kitchen table while my friend’s mom tearfully explained how her husband was married when she first met him and they’d had an affair.
She said she got pregnant with my friend, he left his first wife, married her shortly after, and she felt like she would always be consumed with guilt over it. I mostly remember listening and nodding.
All of this while my friend was waiting for me upstairs in her room with no idea.
When some people hear this story, they jump to:
“That’s child abuse!”
“Trauma dumping!”
Sure, whatever. Eye roll.
It’s not that I don’t think it was inappropriate. It’s that this was the first of many events like it throughout my life in which people I’ve barely known have told me their deepest, darkest secrets. It was going to start sometime, so why not with a bang at 8.
I’ve never felt like there was anything wrong with these people. In fact, I’ve always been impressed that they’re able to sense that I’m the correct person to not only handle the intensity of their confessions but to also never tell another soul.
If I’m being completely honest, even the darkest things people have told me have never made me scared or uncomfortable. From a pretty early age, I’d been exposed to the darker side of humanity and I’ve learned that a lot of people can’t handle hearing about most of it. Because of this, I’ve tended to gravitate to friends with whom I can say anything without judgment.
More than most, I understand that things are rarely black and white and that people often do terrible or shocking things for their own complex reasons. So when people tell me the things that they don’t feel like they can tell anyone else, I get it. Completely. That’s my wheelhouse, baby. Your intuition led you to the right person who won’t even flinch.
There’s almost always this feeling of catharsis that happens when someone shares something that’s been weighing on their soul for a long time. It’s like they breathe differently and even look different afterward. I’ve realized it has nothing to do with me and everything to do with me just being radically accepting. I’m usually not saying anything that blows their mind, but my sheer openness to listening and lack of judgment is enough to shift whatever painful idea about themselves this secret has created.
As a person who’s seen the more monstrous inner depths of people, it’s most concerning to me that as a whole, people are getting more and more afraid to speak their unpopular truths or have anything resembling an individual thought, for fear that it will be weaponized against them. The dark, unspeakable shit will always exist in people. It’s just a whole lot scarier when you feel like you can’t talk about it. Those parts don’t simply go away and the more you push them down, the more dangerous to you and humanity they become.
While a few years ago, I was definitely in the camp of, “If you’re a good person then you don’t have anything to be afraid of!” that’s definitely not where I’ve landed more recently. For a few years now I’ve watched people get ripped to shreds over saying the wrong thing. I’ve seen multiple friends get mercilessly bullied by fellow activists who took issue with the way they contributed to a cause. I’ve watched the list of unacceptable words and ideas grow beyond anything that feels reasonable and into a place that feels almost satirical.
There is definitely a fine line between being mindful of your words and being a mindless attack dog that seeks to kill anyone you disagree with. Is this honestly the way that anyone wants to live? Like you’re constantly performing being a good person out of fear that even your friends might mistake your words or actions? Continuing down this path will eat you alive.
I see an entire generation coming up who is chronically depressed despite being more connected to others than ever, and I can’t help but feel at least part of it is because 1) they’ve pushed down any sense of individual thought in favor of what everyone agrees with, and 2) they’re seeing constant examples online of people being torn apart for even questioning the herd.
When you become so disconnected from who you are that you’re not longer free to question your beliefs and your social interactions largely become parroting back and forth widely-approved talking points, that’s the loneliest fucking existence there is.
I say this because that’s exactly what being in a cult was like. For 17 years I watched every word I said, lived in a constant state of fear of being shunned, and despite being surrounded by a large community of people who I believed loved me, it was all extremely conditional, and because of that, I felt so permanently alone with no escape.
Thinking back, maybe it was those oversharing adults in my life who actually saved me somehow because they exposed me to a level of radical honesty that felt so freeing but impossible for me to act on within the community I was raised in.
The thing is, because of my past experiences, even if I agree with some of the political issues these people are talking about, I can’t get on board with the self-cannibalizing, pile-on, zero critical thought, burn-down-anyone-who-veers-from-the-agreed-upon-narrative, highly-conditional nature of where the culture is moving. If that makes me seem like I’ve suddenly switched teams, that couldn’t be further from reality, but so be it. There’s no going back for me.
We need more openness. Less defensiveness and judgment. More going deep. And we need more people who can handle hearing devastating confessions because, with all the pent-up emotions building over the last few years that are likely to burst any day now, I probably won’t have the bandwidth to listen to all of them.