The Difference Between Privacy and Hiding

Get far enough into most people and you come up against a shut door. They will happily let you assume it opens onto a broom cupboard, something dull back there, a couple of skeletons at worst. Now and then they are telling the truth. Now and then, there is a whole cold wing behind it that even they have not walked into in years.

Some things you withhold. Some things withhold you.

My friend R. will tell you about her divorce inside the first ten minutes, then the father who drank, then the year she could not make herself leave the flat. People call her an open book and they mean it warmly. I have known her eleven years. I could not name one thing she is actually frightened of. The book is open. The book is also, I believe I know now, left out on the table on purpose, so that you will not go rummaging for the other one, the one with the split spine that she keeps somewhere you are never going to be shown.

My grandmother locked a drawer in her dresser and kept the key in a cracked teacup on the same surface, right there, so that anyone could have opened it in the time it takes a kettle to boil. Nobody ever did. After she died, we found a stopped wristwatch inside, a few foreign coins, a recipe in handwriting none of us could place, and a bookmark I had made when I was eight. Nothing, in other words. The lock had never been about the contents. It was about her having a little corner of the world that was hers and unquestioned, and the rest of us knowing, without being told, that the teacup was not an invitation.

So, there are two things that answer to the very same description, and I want to get them apart, because from outside they are identical. Closed door, closed door. You cannot tell them by looking, which is precisely why so many people get talked out of the first on the grounds that they must be guilty of the second.

Here is the distinction as well as I can manage it, and I should warn you now that it buckles under weight further down, so hold it loosely!

Privacy is the border you keep around something that is already whole. You could show it. You have decided that not everyone is owed the view, and the deciding is the entire substance of the thing.

Hiding works the other way about. The door is doing something to you. What sits behind it has a pull, a gravity, and the concealment is less a choice you make than a flinch the fear performs on your behalf while you watch.

Donald Winnicott, who spent his working life with children and with the mess adults make of having once been children, wrote a line I have never got out from under. It is a joy to be hidden, and a disaster not to be found.He believed the healthy self keeps a sealed core, incommunicado, never handed over even to the people it loves the most, and that the sealed part was not an injury. It was the self having somewhere to stand. The damage he watched for was of another sort. It arrived when the sealed room stopped being a place you could walk out of and slowly became a place you couldn’t, when the hiding stopped serving the self and started standing in for it.

Every child knows both states in the body before it has the words. Think of hide and seek, the good spot behind the coats, the seeker getting warmer, your own breath gone enormous in your ears, and the whole delight of it resting on the certainty that you will be found, that being found is the point and the hiding only the sweet postponement of it.

Now think of the child who hid too well, in the shed, in the chest nobody remembered, the one the game left behind, who waited and waited and understood by degrees that no one was coming, and felt the fun drop out from under into something with no floor. Winnicott’s whole sentence, played out on a wet afternoon……

Hidden and found is a game. Hidden and forgotten is the first grief a person ever has.

How, then, do you tell which one you are doing, when from the pavement they are the same dark pane?

Not by the contents. Everyone conceals something and the something is nearly always dull. The tell is what the silence does to you when you are alone with it. Sit with a private thing and you feel ordinary, faintly bored even, a person holding a receipt they keep meaning to file. Sit with a hidden thing and it swells. It grows louder in the dark. After a while it starts making your decisions for you.

Shame is the other tell, and the more reliable of the two. Privacy shares a bed happily with pride. You can withhold something and feel completely fine about it, generous even, the way you feel fine not narrating your marriage to a colleague at the printer. Hiding always has a fold of shame in it somewhere, sometimes so old and threadbare you have stopped clocking it as shame at all and simply call yourself a private person. That relabelling is the con. It is shame that has learnt to dress well and use the correct words at dinner.

There is one more test and this one is almost physical. Ask whether you could open the thing at will. Real privacy opens on your terms, when someone has earned it or the night has run on long enough, and you feel the latch give. With hiding, try imagining yourself saying the thing out loud, and watch your body answer before your mind gets a vote. The throat shuts. Something in the chest braces for a blow. You did not choose silence. You found out that you already had.

You keep a door shut. The question is whether you could open it.

People in love sometimes announce that they keep no secrets from one another, and they say it the way you might boast of a clean bill of health, and I have never once heard it without a small private flinch on their behalf. A person with no sealed room is not more honest. They are more available, which is a different quality altogether and not always a kind one to have let yourself become.

The lover who comes for the last locked drawer, who reads the phone while you are in the shower, who wants the diary, the old passwords, the deleted drafts, all of it, does not ask to be close to you. Closeness survives a shut door with no trouble. What that person wants is the end of your separateness, and your separateness was the only thing that made you worth loving to begin with, the fact of your being a country they might visit and never annex.

We are living, though, inside conditions purpose-built to jam this signal, and I do not think the jamming is accidental. Byung-Chul Han named it the transparency society, the standing demand that everything show itself, render itself visible, give an account of itself in the open, and he saw that the demand is not warmth. It is control with a friendlier logo. The confessional used to be one small dark box in one cold building you could leave. Now it is the entire apparatus, the phone in your palm, the little lens you aim at your own weeping face for an audience of strangers who will pay you back for the tears in a currency of thumbs.

Foucault said the West had made of us a confessing animal, and he wrote that before the timeline, before “story time”, before the genre of the laid-off manager posting the redundancy letter over three paragraphs of growth and gratitude, before the whole performance of being an open person became the surest available method of staying a closed one. That is the sleight of hand nobody names.

Total disclosure makes a magnificent hiding place. Say enough, loudly enough, with a catch in the voice if you can produce one, and people will file you under brave and stop digging.

R. taught me that, without meaning to. The open book is a wall with very good lighting.

I watched a man at a dinner once take a lull in the talk and fill it with the worst year of his life, in detail, addressed to people he had met at the coat rack, and the table went soft and murmurous around him, and it took me the rest of the evening to work out what I had actually seen. It was not vulnerability. How could it have been?! It was a land grab. He had helped himself to all the emotional oxygen in the room and I am fairly sure he did not know he had done it.

Confession as dominance. The softest-looking power move going.

And it always arrives dressed as love, which is the part that makes it so hard to turn down. Why won’t you open up to me? I’m only trying to hold space. Do the work! There is a whole vocabulary now, lifted out of the consulting room and stripped of the one thing that redeemed the consulting room, which was that you paid for it and got to leave, and the vocabulary gets used to lever you open. Some of the people asking you to be vulnerable are running surveillance and filing it under intimacy. Not all of them. But you are allowed to check, and you are allowed to keep the drawer shut while you do.

Here is where my tidy little distinction has to come apart. I would be lying to keep it neat. I have been writing as though everyone gets to pick privacy over hiding, as though hiding were a bad habit you might audit your way out of over a pot of tea on a Sunday. That is an essay written by somebody safe. Picture the boy three doors down from a father who would put him out on the pavement, whose every silence at the dinner table is hiding in the strictest sense, fear making the reflex for him, and who is entirely right to do it. For him the hiding is not weak nerves. It is competence, the accurate reading of the room and the man and the cold outside the door.

Privacy, the version where you could open the drawer and simply choose not to, is a luxury good. It wants a world that would not punish you for what is inside. Great numbers of people have never lived a day in that world, and to tell them their concealment is unhealthy is only the cruelty of the comfortable, wearing therapy’s cardigan.

And there is a further twist in it because the same machine that shames you for hiding has retired privacy as a working option anyway. When your movements and your pauses over a photograph and the sentence you typed and then deleted are all logged and sold before you have finished having the thought, then deliberate concealment turns into about the last scrap of private life a person has left to them. Which would mean the one hiding in the corner might be the only soul in the room still holding a self the market has not finished reading off the shelf. I do not know what to do with that. It wrecks the moral I had lined up for you. Good! It should!

I told you in the beginning I wanted to hand you a way to audit your own silences. I meant it when I set out. Something has gone on over these pages, though, that I did not plan, which is that I have spent the whole time diagnosing R., rather enjoying it if I am honest, the open book, the wall with the flattering light, when the woman who has just written this essay on how relentless disclosure is the finest hiding place ever built is, I notice, me. Doing it now!

You have had my grandmother’s teacup and a friend I have shrunk down to a single letter and not one true sentence about the drawer I keep, the one whose key is nowhere near it, and I am not going to give you that drawer here at the end as a tender little reveal, because that would just be R.’s trick again with better footnotes.

So, I will stop instead. The window stays shut. From where you are standing you cannot tell which kind it is. Most days, neither can I.

Tamara

Not a tip jar. A ledger for what you underlined in your mind.