Ain’t Nobody’s Business but My Own

By Pamelagrace Beatty

Whenever I would ask my grandmother a question she felt was none of my business, she would answer, “That’s for me to know and you to find out.”  I found that so irritating.  “But gramma, I want to know,” I would plaintively reply.  That didn’t work.  Her lips were sealed.  She had no problem managing her boundaries.  But I did.

For some odd reason I felt that if someone asked me a question, I should give them an honest answer.  I didn’t realize that some things were nobody’s business but my own. Frequently, I tried to answer those questions even though they made me uncomfortable.  I didn’t feel I had the right to ignore them. My mother tried her best to help me get over that.  She insisted I not answer questions from nosy neighbors like, “I saw your mother leaving the house all dressed up last night.  Where did she go?” Or “How often do your parents take you to church? They didn’t. My younger sister and I always walked there by ourselves, at our mother’s insistence. It was all up hill and I continually protested about how far it was, and how hard it was to walk up all of those hills. My mother ignored my protests and said it would make my skinny little legs bigger.  To my annoyance, it did not.

This urge to purge, or to give an honest answer to somebody’s question even though it was none of their business became a problem even I could see. I got in a lot of trouble for telling mom’s business. Painful trouble!  I did stop answering those questions but my way of doing it needed refinement. I was a bit blunt. Being blunt as a child to adults was also painful when my mother would hear about it.  Now I was embarrassing her by being obnoxious and rude.  I just couldn’t win! My solution became to simply say nothing. This wasn’t the best solution, but it was less of problem than telling more than I should, or responding in a way that offended people. This was my pattern for many years until one day…

Just for me

I was walking through the woods with my ex-boyfriend who had recently become my current boyfriend again.  I was so happy!  I had thought we would never be together again, yet here we were, walking around a lovely little lake surrounded by tall trees and bright, fragrant flowers.  As I held his hand, I felt all was right with my world. Then he mentioned a book he was reading.  His description of it was not getting through the blissful fog of my mind. Finally, noticing my inattention, he growled, “I guess this was just for me.”  In that moment, my feelings were hurt.  Here we were on this idyllic, romantic walk, with trees, a lovely lake and birds chirping merrily over our heads, and he was trying to get me interested in some dry, old book with a complicated message. Even though I asked him to keep talking about the book, he wouldn’t.  That hurt my feelings too. I felt rejected. I was upset that he wasn’t as happy as I was just to be back together again.  He was upset that I wasn’t interested in the book whose message he found so intriguing. The happiness in the moment died.

Later, when I thought about the incident, I realized something important.  He was right. In fact, what he was reading, and learning was just for him. The book’s message was touching him in a way it wouldn’t have for me; as my seeing our walk through the woods as a wonderful, romantic moment, was just for me not for him. It started me thinking about how many times in our lives something is just for us. It isn’t something we need to or have to share with anyone else. And yes, people will push back on us for not “sharing” or answering their questions.  But we have the right not to.  The way we decline to answer, or share is key.

Times not to tell

Somewhere along the way of my life, I gained a reputation for not telling.  My friends knew  they could trust that whatever they told me would stay between us. I liked having that reputation. I liked that my friends trusted me with their secrets.  Later, my work as a human resources professional required confidentiality and I got a reputation for being the one person in Human Resources that employees could talk to, who wouldn’t go back and tell their managers what was said. Although I rarely could fix their issues with their managers directly, just having someone they could talk to helped.  Other times, coaching them on how to handle the situation helped.

Many jobs require keeping knowledge confidential.  So does what we might learn through relatives and friends and mates/partners. When we learn something through someone else, it helps to ask ourselves, do we have the right to tell?  Did this person tell us that information with the expectation that we would share it with others? I admit, I have learned to expect that some of my friends will tell their mates what I said in confidence, to them.  Even when I have asked them not to share.

Time out to go in

Going back to what my former boyfriend said, sometimes the experience is just for us.  It is not information we need to share. It may be something we truly should sit with, think about, and mull over to gain an understanding of what it is trying to tell us. Once we understand the message that is there for us, then we can share it if we want. We need to give ourselves time to absorb and understand it.  Talking about it to others too soon can muddy or retard that learning. We may only get a superficial understanding from the situation and consequently miss the actual gift of more awareness it is offering. 

An example of this could be when we have a fight with someone, and we are outraged at them and consider them a full-blown horse’s patootie.  We might want to tell friends all about this jerk and what they may have done to us. But if we sit with our upset and examine it more deeply, we may see how we are partly the cause of our upset.  We may see that the situation isn’t purely what they did to us.  We may even see what it was we did that either precipitated the unpleasant situation or added fuel to the fire. Or we may learn something about ourselves that we weren’t aware of and that is a good thing to know.  We might grow because of this realization.  Socrates allegedly said, “An unexamined life is not worth living.” Giving thought to messages that come to us through our experiences, be they reading a book or fighting with friends, will help us both expand our own awareness of who we are, and also help us be better people in the world.