My Biggest Secret: Victoria Ain't Got Nothing on Me!

This article is about my biggest secret. When I first heard about this Associated Content special offer / contest I said to myself "forget it, this isn't my type of thing". I did not want to tell my secret because it's a very dark and scary; readers would cringe at it and think less of me. I just could not live with myself and the shame caused by telling everyone the truth. So I deleted the contest rules and forgot about it.

Then, I saw that the topic became popular and a few of my friends told AC about their biggest secrets. They had the strength to lay everything out on the public table. Still, I was not completely convinced to write about my biggest secret in public.

I thought extensively about why everyone keeps secrets. There are many different reasons. The main reason is embarrassment. We feel that, if it became known by other people, it will make us look dumb or weaker even though it might have not been a big deal. Another reason is shame. We feel that, if known, we will feel humiliated. Sometimes we hide the truth because it is too painful to relive by talking about it. Sometimes by revealing our secrets we will also be forced to show a long series of lies we told in order to protect the secret and the secret may not even be as big or bad as the lies created to protect it. Then there is the obvious reason: to keep from being punished for the truth. It might be something small like lying to our parents when we were just children or something bigger like we cheated on our taxes or murdered someone. One more reason to keep secrets is to protect someone from the truth which might hurt that person. And there many reasons beyond these few I listed above.

Some secrets just affect us ourselves and no one else. So these secrets are our own personal business and are pretty safe, at least from the standpoint that usually no one else is hurt by them. But sometimes these type of secrets affect other indirectly, like our friends and family don't want to see us get hurt or they might be upset that we didn't trust them enough to confide in them.