As Sick as our Secrets

My book group recently read the book “Everything I Never Told You” by Celeste Ng. In certain ways, I felt like I was revisiting my own family’s mode of communication, or actually, non-communication about many things. Things did not work out well for the family in the book, and I missed a lot because of the with holdings in my own family, which of course I learned and practiced in my own life until I learned there was another way.
What is this “don’t tell people” about your own reality, anyway? I could give you a thousand reasons for it, but, in the end, I see how much harm it does to intimacy. If there are lots of subjects that are taboo to talk about, including one’s feelings, so many missed connections and understandings of each other are missed in the process. There was such such emptiness in the non-connections in most of the relationships in the book. Our book group discussed the sadness of it all.
I end up thinking about the old example of how the women over the generations in a family fix their hams in the same way, which involved cutting the end off the ham. The story goes that “that was how Grandma always did it”, but you learn that Grandma did it that way because her pan was too short. There may have been a reason for the behavior once upon a time, but that was then and this is now. I even think about it when I post on FB or on this blog. I am breaking all kinds of family rules in talking about heretofore taboo subjects, feelings, thoughts people might disagree with, dementia, lots more, I’m sure. Life becomes so much richer with self-expression. What do we really think is going to happen when we tell people our truths?

I would love to hear other’s thoughts on this subject.