--{ confidante }------
So I have to tell you, I used to have a general confidante. Not a confidante-by-the-issue, which is really what you are when you read this, or what you are when I call you up on the telephone from work and blather on and on to you about my big story idea or my big paper idea or my guilty pleasure of publishing or whatever. No, I mean a general confidante, someone I'd tell everything and anything to.
It was nice having a confidante. I called my confidante up at all hours, and told my confidante all sorts of things. Not just secret things, as the title would suggest. But lots of things. My thoughts about the day, my random neat new ideas. I would gush to my confidante.
Before having a confidante, I had a journal. My journal played the same role as the confidante, listening to everything I had to say. It probably helps that I don't make such a big distinction between speaking and writing. They both feel very similar to me, coming out. There were two different things about the journal: the journal was quieter, and the journal remembered everything I wrote.
Notice I said "used to" in the first paragraph? Well, the deal is that for various reasons, I don't have this confidante any longer. It was surprisingly sudden, this loss, and did not occur at the time one would expect.
Why had I made this person my confidante?1 It wasn't because we were similar, certainly, because me and my confidante were not at all similar. We reacted differently to things, and a lot of the ideas and coincidences and short stories that I'd read that I thought were so twitchingly cool were not so to my confidante. And this always depressed and frustrated me, somewhat. Put a damper on things.
Was it just that my confidante had the patience and the energy to listen to me? Or was my confidante an imperfect confidante? Is the True Confidante someone who can not only listen, but empathize? React similarly? Because if so, my confidante was not a True Confidante.
Now, as I said, I no longer have a confidante. Nor do I keep a journal, not a real confide-everything journal. I've been reflecting on this lately, why I don't keep a real journal. I think there are two contributing reasons. For one thing, I had that confidante, like I said. Why keep a journal when you're already telling everything to your confidante? That was my subconscious reasoning, I'm sure. For another thing, there's this web page.
I started keeping a web page back in . . . 1994? 1995? 1996? Something like that, I forget. Seems like an important date to remember, but hey, there ya go. It started out like many pages start out, a giant bunch of badly formatted bookmarks. Then I started collecting information and putting that on my web page too. And then I started writing on it, things that I thought might be of general interest, or something like that.
Eventually, my web page ended up being more a place for me to think about abstract personal things and to log what I'd seen and done so that I don't forget. Part of the role of a confidante, or a journal, really. But parts that weren't entirely being fulfilled by my confidante, I suppose.
But this page is not a True Journal, and you, dear reader, are not a True Confidante. I don't write everything on here, especially not anything that I want to keep secret from any one person, given that anyone, really, could have access to my web page. It's not like I have tons of Big Secrets (though I guess I have a few), it's more that I generally like to keep certain things -- like weird confessions from friends, gripes about coworkers, things you might tell one or two of your friends but not necessarily the whole world -- off my web page.2
Which makes me, I guess, not a true web diarist. But then, I never claimed to be. I keep lots of stuff off this web page, or obscure it at least. When I write anything, I keep in mind my audience, which I figure is mostly friends, some coworkers, some acquaintances, some former friends I'd lost touch with, some total strangers. Maybe even some relatives. And I write with the audience in mind. Any humor here, it's for you, not me. And I try to fill in all the background knowledge so that each page makes sense.
I never did this with my confidante, never spoke to my confidante with audience (i.e. the confidante) in mind. I didn't feel as if I should, with my confidante being a confidante and all. I should be able to tell my confidante anything, however I wanted to. We were one that way, I told myself.3
To me, that's the crux of the matter: the one-sidedness of the confidante construct. Why I think I won't look again for the kind of True Confidante I've described above. Because in retrospect, I don't think I should have forced that on anyone. What I do now is very carefully pick the people I choose to confide in, to make sure they'd be interested (or I try to do that, at least). I have Issue Confidantes. Like I'll tell law-reviewy thoughts to Andy or Justin, and relationshippy things to Gina and Amy, and so forth. It takes a bit more juggling and results in a few thoughts never getting said, but that's how it goes. I think if I ever have a True Confidante again, it'll be because our issues overlap enough such that there's a confidante relationship on all or most of them.
050501
1. Yeah, trust fits in there somewhere. And so does going out.
2. I must note, however, that not everyone has the same approach as me. Take Doug for instance, who does have a True Journal. He writes everything, even stories about his friends and acquaintances. It is a marvel.
3. I know. Shudder.