When to keep a secret and when to divulge? From the Brady Bunch episode that taught us no one liked a tattle tale via Jan’s experience of insistently tattling on her brothers and sisters; to her then taking the advice too far and not divulging important information when someone was in danger. As we get older where do we draw the line and do we get better at it?
Throughout the years I understood the matter as this: if it’s your friend’s secret and no one is in imminent physical danger, then you keep mum about it. Now if my good friend turns out to be Jack the Ripper, sorry dude but I’m turning you in. But my friend the cheater, um… I’m going to keep this one to myself after a good long talk with him/her – the infamous light-handed but honest “Keisha scolding” as I like to call it.
In my world of thinking, divulging that your friend has cheated on their lover only brings additional pain to both parties and honestly, if it were me I’d rather not know, especially if the affair is over. The self-righteous I cannot keep this secret, even if you are my friend is bull shit. The reality is I’m not your friend.
But there have been times when I was really up against the wall. Like when one of my male classmates in high school came to school with a gun to scare one of my guy friends because he was bullying the poor kid. After seeing the gun in his backpack I fretted all that day, what to do? Be a tattle tale? But when the the last period bell rang and I saw my classmate nervously hanging inside the halls not wanting to go outside, I knew what I had to do. I went to my math teacher (loved him!) and told him what the deal was. I also gave him the back story and reminded him that the boy with the gun was a good kid. I then went to my friend outside and gave him a good scolding about why bullying is not cool and the horrible scenario that could have unfolded.
Though on the flip side of things, a few months later while hanging out with my best friend and her boyfriend he showed us his gun. It was silver, heavy and the coldest piece of metal I’d ever touched. I flipped the gun around in my hands in total awe and fright and then gently handed it back to him with the request to put it away. That afternoon he divulged to us that he’d used that gun to shoot another one of my guy friends. Until that moment I had no idea they’d had beef. Luckily my friend lived through the shooting as the gun shot only grazed his butt while he was riding a bike through the neighborhood. I kept the secret of who shot whom, for fear of a war ensuing and I never told school officials this kid had a gun, as he rarely ever came to school anyway. Two weeks later while driving recklessly through the neighborhood my friends boyfriend was stopped by an off-duty cop. This kid pulled that same gun out and shot the man in the face, killing him. Boston police was enraged. He was found and tried quickly, currently serving multiple life sentences in jail.
The unnerving question that haunted my seventeen year old mind back then was could I have prevented that somehow? The angst of keeping secrets has never failed to boggle my mind, even in adulthood.
Say What?!