Collecting open secrets

What you call fate is quite ordinary

Cross-posted from Twitter.

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Photo: Glass Tea House Mondrian by Hiroshi Sugimoto (shot by @wiillowbelle)

I think people are endlessly fascinating. Sometimes you meet a person and they have such an interesting or strange life that you wonder how it could be possible. But then you spend more time with them and then you figure out exactly why things are the way they are.

I am not interested in actual secrets, as in things they don't tell anyone. I'm more interested in truths that are self-evident if you really get to know them, the ones that are out in the open but never stated and all their friends and lovers would agree. I love collecting these secrets about people—the ones that make them so uniquely them. I don't mean that they have any enduring, permanent qualities, like they have a *core*. But there are beliefs and behaviors that are invisible to the person like water is to a fish. These open secrets are essential for reinforcing the life they currently have, but they also constrain (or enable) the possibilities in their life.

For example, the charming person whom everyone wants as a dinner party guest but who somehow can't maintain close friendships or relationships. And then you find out they are restless and anxious and never know what they want, and this repels people who care about stability. Their charisma is like Cinderella's gown, only beautiful for a night.

The inspiring lone genius who wants to change the world but somehow can't find anyone to do it with them. And then you learn that no one is ever good enough for them, and they make unreasonable demands because they cannot stand not having the upper hand.

The incredibly timid person you meet at a party who is, you discover later, known for their opinionated and grandiose writing online. And then you realize they yearn for a delusion, a time of war and epics and romance, and this matters more to them than attending to reality in front of them.

There are good ones too! Some unassuming people are like helpful stage hands, funding projects and connecting talented people to each other in the shadows. These, however, are less secret because it's more socially acceptable to share good things about someone.

I could go on and on. Sometimes they're sad, but not always, because often a person's greatest strengths are directly related to their weaknesses and you realize you can't have one without the other, or they'd be someone else entirely.

I believe that if you were subject to the same forces as another (born with their genes, their upbringing, and the sum of all the experiences they've had), you would end up living identically. You would act the same. If you can't imagine yourself acting like them, it's because there's something you aren't seeing. We are no better than the pockets of consciousness we have been privileged or cursed to see.

Point is, we all have them. They rule our lives. They're not necessarily bad, unless you're not living the life you want and you have no way of figuring out what's in the way, in which case the ability to spot them in yourself and in others can help.

Open secrets are not stated, and they operate implicitly. But once you know them, they explain a lot about how you prioritize certain values or outcomes. They are the things people notice about you that either draw them in or repel them, and they rarely tell you.

Most of the time, they're revealed in an ordinary fashion. We are constantly training the people around us how to treat us. If you get visibly annoyed when your friend talks about politics, they will not talk about politics around you in the future unless they're *trying* to annoy you, which they now know how to do. If you have a fight with your partner and give honest feedback about how they make you feel but they get mad and defensive and invalidate your feelings, then you are unlikely to open up in the future, because they just signaled they care more about protecting the idea of who they are in their heads (their ego narrative), than communication and the health of your relationship. You realize they are not someone who can receive honest feedback, and their previous partners would probably agree with you.

This is also why when you get a weird vibe from someone and then ask around, you usually get a bunch of similar sentiments and anecdotes. The whisper network works because that's where open secrets are exchanged. When you aggregate opinions from independent sources, you can more confidently attribute behaviors to the person in question rather than to distortions by the perceivers.

A while ago, I tweeted, "you get the life you tense around". What I meant was there are certain things that your attention and body contract around, and you spend time and energy towards making sure they "go right" (whatever that means for you). If you really hate being late or losing your belongings, you will spend a lot of time "holding" time, social conventions, and locations of objects in your head. This comes at the cost of other things, because that's how prioritization works. If you're running late, you'll now spend the whole car ride checking the time and thinking about how late you are instead of enjoying the sunny weather or the radio.

In this case, it's not that bad. But if you tense around things like "I always have to be right" or "I never want to feel ashamed" you will do a bunch of acrobatics in an attempt to get those outcomes, and it could get in the way of growth or self-expression.

Over a lifetime, it could be the difference between finding love, reaching your full potential, or having a good relationship with your kids, and not having those things. What you call fate lies in the knowledge people already have about you.