Secrets

A friend of mine today asked if I could keep a secret. Now, don't get your hopes up because I can keep a secret and this post is not about blabbing some juicy secret for the masses to hear. If you want that, I suggest you visit postsecret.com. Anyway, so when this friend asked if I could keep a secret, it got me thinking...has anyone actually said "no" to this question? 


"Can you keep a secret?"
- "No. As a matter of fact, I can't so you better not tell me..."


I don't think so! Who doesn't want to hear some juicy secret that supposedly no one else (or very few people) knows about? 


Then I started thinking about those people who start a sentence with, "Don't tell anyone but...[insert someone else's secret here]..." I mean honestly, how many times have you been on the receiving end of that statement? Or maybe you said that to someone? Multiple people, even? And then suddenly everybody knows! It's a nasty habit that some people have. Those are the people that should answer "no" to the aforementioned question, but they don't. It's scary when you think about it. No one's secrets are safe when they are shared with anyone but themselves...and quite frankly, some people are bad at keeping their own secrets. 


A friend of mine in high school and I started a mini social experience back in the day. It was stupid, but it proved a point. We started a perfectly harmless, but apparently totally juicy rumor (at least to the immature high schoolers) to see how long it would take to spread around the school. So my friend and I in first period told three different people: "Did you hear? Sarah K***** got stuck in a locker!" Well even though this little piece of untrue information was totally petty (and barely believable), those three people we told looked back at us with eyes wide in amazement as they said, "Really?! No way! How did that happen?!" So, we made up an ellaborate story about how someone bet her "five thou" (a.k.a. five thousand yen...it was my high school in Japan...which was roughly $46 dollars at the time) that she couldn't fit in a locker, but she was determined to do it and when she did, she got stuck and three people had to try to pull her out, and then we had to get a cafeteria worker to bring out the butter... Well when we got to the part about the butter, that's when people were hooked! We barely got out of second period before other people came circling back to us saying, "Hey! Did you hear Sarah K***** got stuck in a locker?!" and by lunch time, Sarah was running around trying to figure out who started this false rumor. We did fess up to Sarah about starting the rumor and set the record straight (which of course took longer to circulate than the initial rumor because it wasn't as juicy so we had to tell more people ourselves).


As stupid as this may have been, it proved something. People are always looking to be the first to know something and secrets are never sacred when it comes to juicy gossip. 

So if you have a secret, be careful who you tell. And if you are the receiver of said secret, keep it to yourself (unless, of course, that secret is going to affect or hurt someone physically, mentally or emotionally...but that's a whole other blog post).