Privacy is held up as sacred - this is nothing new.
Privacy is deliberately massacred - also, nothing new.
We've written this book before, it just took longer.
So where, exactly, does honesty live? (I was going to say "Where does honesty lie?" but, even though it wasn't intentional, it seemed far too contrived).
The only place it can truly reside is in your head.
We give ourselves away to a greater or lesser degree every day of our lives. Not always by choice - it's often difficult to fully consider the effect that folding your arms while in conversation might have, or blinking too much, or looking briefly sideways, or tapping a pencil.
If you know where to look, no one is private.
Everyone knows that when you write in a diary you assume that someone, someday, will find it. Even the purging of your deepest darkest weirdnesses - why would you write it down at all if it wasn't for the possibility that you will be not just heard, but understood.
Our need for privacy is forever at war with our need for acceptance.
And with that, I begin.
3 comments:
In my experience that "someone, someday" is very likely "yourself, later" and the understanding produced is self-understanding. Nothing to sneeze at, that.
A fine insight - our selves in the future are (or can be) so vastly different than our selves in the present that it might just is well be another. So, as you write, you must trust the one you will become to view the one you with compassion. Not an easy trick. But certainly a valuable one.
People who excel at the hiding-while-revealing enterprise are called artists.
Post a Comment