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Keeping the Secret

The Silent Chaos

By First name Last namePublished 6 years ago 5 min read
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What harm can a Secret do? A lot 

Imagine you are tasked with keeping a secret no matter what happens, you cannot tell anyone. Given to you by someone very close, you’d truly do your best to hide it right? Imagine wanting to keep the secret so badly that you have based your entire personality behind it, or rather you hide the secret behind your personality. Changing how you think, the way you look, the way you speak. The face you put on every day is done so to keep this secret as a sign to the world that you have nothing to hide. You do all this because you don’t want even the slightest chance of letting the secret slip. You become so good at hiding it that sometimes you even forget you have something to hide in the first place. It has come to the point that you are not even worried about people finding out and putting on the mask has become second nature to you.

Now imagine being alone, not physically in terms of people, but metaphorically in that no one can understand how you see things or feel as you do. This image can become heavier than any physical weight. Although abstract, it takes its toll on one both mentally and physically. Sooner or later this feeling evolves into crippling fear. Fear that no one will empathize with you and judge what they don’t understand, almost as if your emotions are irrelevant simply because they are complex, and others can’t comprehend them. Now, what if all this is because of that one secret, and that it wasn’t given to you by anyone, but rather developed by yourself. The extreme fear of judgment by your peers is the sole reason for all your efforts to keep that secret. It is so heavy that you feel sharing it with anyone is just an invitation to judgment. Judgment so harsh that even if you were to tell a complete stranger you wouldn’t be able to live knowing that somewhere someone else knows. Even your family and friends are blind to this secret. Even though you can rely on them to love and care for you all the same you are still afraid of the thoughts that would unconsciously form if they knew. You’ve kept it hidden so well for fear of its discovery. You are so terrified that if people find out, even those closest to you, they will see you in whole new light and judge. So, you’ve kept it hidden all this time because once you tell someone, you can't take it back.

With fear motivating the behavior to keep the secret and the knowledge of knowing how to hide it so well, you would think that concealing it would be easy right? Well what if I told you the rabbit hole goes deeper? As if the secret wasn’t troublesome enough, imagine that with every day you hide it from the world, you die a little on the inside. Every day is an uphill battle struggling to get to the peak, only to find another mountain ahead. Now, after keeping it for years, what once may have been a tiny pebble, has evolved into a giant mental boulder upon your back. You feel the weight taking its toll. Your body and spirit breaking under its immense pressure. With every passing day, you want to shout for someone to help, anyone who can help you bare this burden, but as heavy as the boulder is, the fear of judgment is heavier… Even if you know you are slowly walking to the edge of a mountain, the fear of judgment is still heavier. Knowing this, you are forced to persist, giving it all your strength so that you don’t even wince under the immense toll you are forced to hide. Imagine going through this every single day with no end in sight. It is because the weight of judgment is so bad that your mental state has drastically changed. You have brainwashed yourself into keeping this secret. Things have become so bad that you can’t even say it out loud. You even go out of your way to avoid certain things or topics because they may give you the slightest reminder of the pain you feel. By changing who you are, you have become oblivious and numb to hiding the secret, yet still so sensitive to the slightest reminder of its presence. Imagine being stuck in this constant and painful limbo. Dying on the inside to let someone know and ask for help, yet so fearful of what they might say that it’s the one thing worse than your current pain. Sounds awful right? What if I told you that’s not even the worst part?

Despite all the pain you face every day, your fear of criticism is that much worse. You feel so pitiful that the assumption of people judging you is worth betting the farm. What’s worse than that? You feel like you deserve it. You feel that everyday people carry the same burden as you or have already dealt with this problem. What feels like a boulder on your shoulders, is a grain of sand in their hand. You feel so worthless because you can’t deal with the problems that everyone else has already taken care of assuming they had the problem at all. You feel even worse because you put yourself into this situation. You feel pathetic because it was only your fear that what stopped you from solving this problem so long ago. No one forced you to keep this secret, you chose to keep it, and there is no one else to blame. You have become the catalyst to your own downfall. Now it seems like it’s too late, and you’ve missed the opportunity to solve the problem. This leads you to hate yourself. Feeling as though you deserve this onslaught of punishment. Stuck in this endless loop of constant pain and no one to blame but yourself. Imagine this terrible situation choosing to deal with constant pain every day for fear of the alternative. Being all alone with no one to help bare the burden, and there is no one to blame but yourself. Terrible right? Can you imagine such a horrific situation? Because I can.

anxiety
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About the Creator

First name Last name

I’m just a kid trying to navigate through life. Whether or not I find my way is yet to be determined

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