TThe first significant secret tiptoed into my life the day I got my first period. I was thirteen when I saw my stained underwear in the washroom and thought I must be fatally ill. After being told what it actually was, I remember feeling furious and helpless... Suddenly, cycling to school or playing basketball became difficult, at least for a week each month. But what felt worse was that I could not share this anger with my brother, who was only a year younger and had grown up with me like a twin. Instead, I was made to actively hide sanitary products from him. God forbid, if a bloody stain ever showed up, my mother or grandmother would urgently swoop in and quietly take care of it—changing the bedsheet before the men in the house noticed anything.

Fretting to hide period blood was not just a part of my younger years. It consumed my early twenties too. I bled heavily due to a medical condition, which meant changing pads frequently and often staining my clothes and the chair or the couch or the bed I was sitting on. The consequences were humiliating, not because of the condition, but because my stains were supposed to stay hidden. My period was meant to be a secret, but my body refused to play along.

Well-kept secrets are an intimate part of women's lives, carried like heirlooms. We keep them close, hug them tight, sometimes bury them deep inside, only for them to resurface years later and quietly wreak havoc.

'You don't trust me enough. Why didn't I hear it from you first?' Men feel hurt when secrets are kept from them. Husbands often complain about it to their wives, fathers to their daughters. And I understand—the absence of transparency or vulnerability in any relationship can sting. But I also wonder if there is ever a moment of self-reflection beneath the hurt. A moment of asking: why was the secret kept from me in the first place?

Do we, as women, enjoy keeping secrets? Or has it been so deeply ingrained in us to carry the weight of our myriad feelings that we’ve forgotten how to part with them? There is a constant demand for ‘honesty’—but only if it doesn’t make the other person uncomfortable, or challenge their privilege.

Looking back, I think I’ve known how to keep a secret for as long as I’ve existed. As a young girl growing up in the 90s and early 2000s in small town India, one was conditioned to see women only a certain way. The obedient ones were put on a pedestal, while those who ‘talked back’ were vilified. I have seen both categories of young women foray in and out of romantic relationships, secretly. It was forbidden to talk about them. What was at stake, if someone found out, was one’s freedom. Older women kept secrets too, just as often as the younger ones. The reasons were different, of course, and sometimes as trivial as stealing and saving a few hundred rupees from their husband’s pocket.

Every woman, at some point in her life, has been catcalled, harassed, or abused by a stranger in a public place. But most of us are used to coming home and behaving as if nothing happened.

Again, what’s at stake is our freedom. Would I still be allowed to go to university or work if I told my parents I was being followed by a random man? Would I still be permitted to use social media if I told my family about the kind of messages I receive online?

I was in the twelfth standard when the infamous Delhi gang rape, commonly known as the Nirbhaya case, happened. It’s been more than a decade, but I still vividly remember watching the news of her death on TV, then coming back to my room, reading the details of the horrific case on the computer, shutting the door, and sobbing silently.

Back then, the looming question in my drawing room—echoed during prime-time news—was whether I should be allowed to go to Delhi University for graduation, which had been my plan all along. I had never been to Delhi, but the 17-year-old me was captivated by the idea of living and studying there.

With stories like these constantly in the news, when my parents took a leap of faith, trusting in the goodness of the world, and let me move from a tiny, protected cocoon to the big city, how could I have told them that just three months in, a man in his forties had made advances on my friend and me as we were walking back from college? I could already hear the questions that would follow. Was it dark when you were coming back? Who was this friend you were with? Why were you on that particular road?

The questions would not stop until a loophole was found—some crack to suggest that what happened to me was somehow my fault.

As an eighteen-year-old, my freedom was everything. So I kept my mouth shut, and the incident remained what it should never have been: a secret. That’s another rule with secrets—they bury themselves even deeper when the perpetrator isn’t a stranger, but someone related to you.

It is strange when you think about it, but as women, we spend much of our young adulthood hiding information about certain men from other men in our lives.

You cannot tell your father about the classmate who has been making inappropriate jokes about you, but you also cannot tell him about the boy you are deeply in love with. In college, you are supposed to study; anything else you do is considered ‘frivolous’ and ‘distracting’. A woman is expected to be grateful for the opportunity to live independently, and falling in love would mean taking unnecessary advantage of that privilege. Once again, our freedom is at stake.

And so by the time we turn twenty-five, most of us are fluent in the art of keeping secrets.

The number of secrets in a woman’s life does not decrease as she ages—or maybe it does. I am too young to be sure of it. I hate keeping secrets, though. The very act of hiding something feels so cumbersome—like I have done something wrong or like my thoughts and needs are not valid enough. A few weeks ago, when a secret made me particularly anxious, this poem came to me in the middle of the night, and I jotted it down on my phone. I think it aptly depicts what secrets do to my body:

secrets are heavy

they arch my back

shorten my breath

give me nightmares

I still carry them

day after day

looking for a safespace

to pour it all out

and laugh out loud

with a heart as light

as a feather

I turned thirty this year, and it has been over a decade since I left my childhood home. It is only now that I realise how little I know about myself. Or perhaps whoever I thought I was was only a projection of who I was supposed to be. One of the hardest parts of growing up as an obedient child is realizing how many layers you subconsciously put on yourself to feel accepted, to belong. Validation is a want, a need, but very often also a survival tool.

Now, as I begin to peel those layers off—slowly, and often painfully—I’m struck by how hard it is to tell which parts of me were shaped to please others, and which were born from my own genuine desire to be a certain way.

Did I become this way to make my parents proud? To avoid being judged? Or because, somewhere deep down, I wanted to be this version of myself? The lines blur. For the longest time, I believed I was not someone who enjoys makeup, but now, when I look back, I think I felt that way because wearing lipstick or kajal, or decking up, was disapproved of by the elders around me.

Had I been born into a different culture, perhaps dance would have been my way of self-expression instead of writing. As a young girl, I loved to dance—it made me happy. But as I entered my teenage years, I began to notice the shifting glances and unspoken judgments. The act of a girl dancing, once innocent and expressive, started to carry implications, which were revealed to me often implicitly, and sometimes explicitly too. At some point, I stopped.

As an obedient, submissive child, I wanted to be liked and approved of at all times, and perhaps that was the reason behind a lot of the things I did or didn’t do.

Secrets are heavy, but the heaviest are the ones I’ve kept from myself.

And now, slowly, day by day, I’m learning to speak them aloud—softly, and without shame. I think that’s how I’m finding my way back to myself.