#71 The secret
because nature didn’t feel like making it square
Dad, what’s that?
An apple, kid.
Why is the apple green?
Because it just is.
Why is it round, dad?
Because nature didn’t feel like making it square.
Why does it have a stick coming out of the top, dad?
Oh, I don’t know, maybe so it can mock me while I try to answer your endless interrogation.
With every new question, the child tightens its grip on its unsuspecting caretaker. Because, let’s be honest, what is a question if not a glorified command? A thinly veiled order demanding an answer. Every time dad responds, he submits. And with every additional answer, he only sinks deeper into the quicksand of his own logic. Once he’s said something, well, he can’t just take it back, can he?
Each new question corners the caretaker into an ever-narrowing space, while the glorious, free-spirited child dances around like an archer, firing off their question-arrows from any and every direction.
If you want to stop this relentless assault, forget about crafting the right answer. That’s amateur hour. No, the real power move is reclaiming control. Either drown them in an excruciatingly long-winded monologue that bores them into silence, or, if you’re feeling a little less delicate, demand absolute quiet.
Every question is, in essence, a shameless claim on your time, your energy, and, by extension, your basic human dignity. More than that, it's an invasion of your personal mental space. The questioner is digging, prying, itching to extract something from your inner world.
Uncomfortable with that? Lucky for you, there exists a weapon of pure genius: the secret.
Ah yes, the secret, a perfectly sealed, utterly opaque little orb of mystery. A shadowy bullet of knowledge locked away in an impenetrable fortress deep within you, completely out of reach of any nosy little interrogator. Keeping a secret, resisting the urge to spill despite the relentless provocations, bestows power. You force respect through silence because you decide what remains unspoken.
Of course, there’s a catch. (Isn’t there always?) The silence required to protect a secret inevitably isolates you. And don’t be fooled, secrets aren’t passive little things. No, no, they grow, intensify, fester. They heat up, pressurise, turn into ticking time bombs. Walk around with one long enough, and you’ll start feeling that eerie, suffocating tension, the creeping paranoia that at any second, the whole thing might explode. That fear alone is enough to lock you into a state of rigid, exhausting vigilance. The secret owns you now, anchoring you in place, making you stubborn, inflexible.
In “Sean Combs, Neil Gaiman, and the Terrible Power of Secrets,” an article published in Rolling Stone, author Mikal Gilmore writes
The burdens we carry — particularly those related to hidden truths — can contribute to our psychological disintegration when they are hidden and held too close. Keeping those secrets will eventually catch up with you. When they do, they might offer you the sort of hard epiphany that, if acted on, leads you to a better place, a better self. That is, if you’re lucky and wise.
But some secrets can’t free the secret-keeper. Rather, the opposite. If we have knowingly harmed somebody — if we’ve stolen something that belonged to them but does not belong to ourselves, including their hope and faith; if we have laid waste to their spirit; if we have assaulted their body…Those are secrets that we want to remain secret. If those secrets are learned, the discovery could result in the devastation of our name, our standing, our career, our prospects for the future. The discovery of some secrets could cost the secret-keeper their wealth, their prestige. It could undo their legacy. It could even cost them their freedom.
I wonder what secrets the people I’ve photographed in the past few days are carrying. Are they still the keepers of their secrets, or have their secrets begun to keep them? Do you see anything that breaks through their surface?
