From Pocket:
What does a secret feel like in your body? If it’s a fun one, it’s a fizzy excitement, one fueling extra smiles and the anticipation of a big reveal—a surprise party, a new relationship, a pregnancy announcement.
But then there are the darker ones—secrets steeped in guilt or shame, ones that feel heavy in your stomach and quicken your heart. The ones that you keep for fear of being found out as a worse version of yourself. These can make you physically sick, and carry the power to influence your actions, often in negative ways, in order to keep them close. By that same logic, they’re the secrets you have the most to gain from sharing.
With so many forces at play, secrets have become one of the most fascinating ways to explore our relationships with ourselves, our friends, and surprisingly, strangers. In the season finale of Grown, The Moth’s podcast all about the challenges and joys of growing up, their team investigates the way we interact with our secrets, from diary entries to anonymous confessions. Check out the episode, launching May 3, as well as our collection of stories that delve into the science of secrets, what we can learn from the most secretive professionals, and how to delineate between secrecy and privacy.
Link to the rest at Pocket
It has, accidentally I hope, become the only way to create conflict: find a long-buried secret and write the heck out of it.
In too many novels.
Privacy is okay; we don’t dump everything we think on each new person we meet.
But the present day, the present world, the present evils are more than loaded enough with opportunities for conflict resolution in novels, and in life.
Maybe it’s a focus on the gothic as somehow more interesting, but not everyone spends their entire remaining life not getting over childhood trauma.
Not everybody has childhood trauma to get over.
The only reason “childhood trauma” works as a trope is its rarity. If it were ubiquitous readers would go all, “Yeah, yeah, get over it you twit.” 😉