When I was growing up, my best friend had a Girl Talk game.  She would pull it out at sleepovers or after school when we were supposed to be doing homework, and three or four of us would gather around and play, hungry to learn the others' juiciest secrets.  But none of us really had juicy secrets in middle school.  I certainly didn't.  When my turn came, I was always stumped. 

We usually got bored retelling our respective crushes and ended up playing my Sweet Valley High game instead.

I always loved hearing other people's secrets rather than revealing my own.  In that sense, and as a writer who is always looking for a "real" story behind the smoke and mirrors people use to conceal themselves, I am still a voyeur. 

It began when I was young.   I wasn't a Peeping Tom, but I remember riding past homes in our town, seeing lights go on in various rooms and wondering what people were doing.  Were they brushing their teeth with Crest or Colgate? What did they have for dinner? What color wallpaper did they have in the living room?  Which books on the shelves? And so on.

In the age of People magazine, YouTube ("Broadcast Yourself!"), MySpace, the proliferation of blogs, personal ad mini-confessionals and tell-all media-not to mention "reality" television, now we don't have to wonder what's on people's minds, in their refrigerators, or even in their bodies (note to self: never watch TLC’s My Shocking Story ever again). Headlines from gossip rags scream at us from the grocery store aisles and tell us more than we ever cared to know. Celebrities conveniently dig up and air out their personal drama and trauma just before their latest project hits theatres, and anyone with an internet connection, webcam and a dream can have a digital soapbox.  I'm not exempt; I fill out all those "All About Me/Tag You're It" surveys I receive from friends, plus I write here and elsewhere, offering up random (and not so random) thoughts about my own existence.

But how much information is too much?  Do people really want to read my tweets about watching an umpteenth episode of Snapped in my pajamas?  Is my life so terribly enthralling that I must steadily update my status on Facebook so everyone knows what I'm doing, with whom, and when?  How personal is too personal? When does being confessional cross the line into sheer narcissism?

I don't have the answers.  I can say that for all the embarrassing or deeply private moments I freely launch into the universe for all to read and dissect, there are a million others I keep close to the vest.  That information is classified.  I never give it all away, and never will, because passing around those precious secrets would make them lose their luster.  I'm for holding back and leaving some things to the imagination, not for spreading it like a Playboy centerfold.

Want to know who I almost eloped with or who really broke my heart?  Why I'm keeping-but never wearing-a pair of ridiculously expensive black leather pants in my closet?   What memory hurts me the most or still makes me swoon?  Where I’m planning to honeymoon or what I’m naming my firstborn?

I'd tell you, but then I'd have to kill you.

pleasebelieveme

Skirtsetter

Somehow, Alexis E. Barton always knew her SAT-worthy vocabulary and wacky turns as an artist's model, pageant runner-up, freelance etiquette coach and event planner would pay ...