How do you do this whole thing anyway?

When you have managed things, your life, your emotions by yourself for a long time. When you have had to deal with things on your own, or compartmentalised your life and shared different bits with different people, but never all of the truth to anyone.
When you look back and realise from an early age you lived your life like a MI5 spy. Not the lying and deception, the manipulation, but just running your life like a spy ring, having mental "Dead letter boxes" and small groups of just interconnecting friends and large groups of acquaintances and one or two people that you trust completely...openness its a challenge.

All of these things make you into the person you are. I remember being told as a child I was secretive; not sneaky, secretive, and as a teenager, and as an adult.
It used to irritate me to be called that. This was for two reasons, firstly, I'm not by nature and secondly, all you had to do was ask the right question at the right time and I would have told anything.

I would have opened my heart up and told you anything and everything  But nobody ever really did when I was younger. I don't know if no body ever really bothered or they tried, and got little response, so didn't bother again.

My grandfather and I were sharers of secrets; how to plants seeds, where the sweets were hidden in the kitchen. How to 'read" clouds to tell if it was going to rain, how to calm a frightened dog, the best walk trough the woods to see the first bluebells in spring...all those were the best of secrets, but when you are five or so, these are important things...

I realised recently that the reason I said nothing to anyone else, wasn't that I was hiding some big dark secret inside, I wasn't.....I just had got to the point where I really thought no one would be that interested anyway, there wasn't a lot to tell.........so on the odd occasion anyone asked, I just didn't say much.
The only person who asked was my mother and I have come very recently to the scary understanding that she wanted to know because she is just damn nosey and likes no one to have any privacy.

It wasn't a wish to understand me and know how I was feeling, just nosiness.

My whole adult life I have managed to keep things inside me. On the surface people will see the person they think I am. I am not being deceitful or untrue, just operating by that inbuilt, and "over the years"   learned behaviour...............if you don't expose yourself no one will come and stamp all over your feeling and destroy you.................except anyone past 20 knows that its not an easy way to go through life and it doesn't work anyway.

At this point I had put some other stuff in here and then deleted it because I felt it said too much............and now I don't know whether to laugh or cry about it..............but it stays deleted.

So when my owner goes on about openness he is fighting years and years of a well learned and managed habit. I think I could never get a  job at wiki leaks.

So yesterday when I was in trouble again for failing to tell him something he couldn't understand why I hadn't told him. I wasn't being secretive, I wasn't not telling him stuff, I just didn't think that it was important enough to register.............and this juicy bit of information that has got me into trouble?
A job offer..............not one on a piece of paper with a job description and a mention of a salary, not one outlining all the benefits and the risk assessment..........no its a job offer of a leaving colleague"if you want t a job in ***********, just call me, there will always be a job for you" sort of job offer.

Well...................very kind of you, thank you, but I don't want a job in ************, too dangerous.
So I had smiled and said, thank you, and not registered it as anything other than that.

THEN, last night when talking I jokingly said something about "When when you throw me out, when I am old, at least I will be able to go to work in ************* as I have a job offer".

 You could have heard a pin drop.

I begged him not to be cross..........tried to explain the nature of the offer etc etc
nine thousand questions later, I was sent to bed with the "We''ll talk about this later".

I wish he could see I wasn't hiding anything, I wasn't being secretive, or not opening up...................its just that it wasn't important enough to register or mention and ................

Oh whats the point....................

I will never get this openness bit right.