Can we denormalize violating people’s privacy and personal space?
& normalize communicating openly?
I wouldn’t have anything to hide if you accepted my truth.
If you are an invasive parent, please stop reading immediately. This article is not for you and you’re too old to accept your mistakes so you’re better off leaving me & this article alone but before you leave, I want you to know that your suffocating surveillance over your child may have made it difficult for them to do bad things but nothing is impossible. So they’re doing what they wanted to do, you just don’t know. haha.
This piece is not about internet safety or government surveillance or data thefts etc. It is about the lack of physical and emotional privacy in our homes.
Checking messages/emails, sifting through pockets, reading personal diaries, reading letters, and eavesdropping are all methods that have been widely used by parents to ‘discipline’ and ‘control’ their child. Not allowing children to close their bedroom doors is not going to help anything.
If you make us feel like criminals, we will be criminals.
Are we allowed to have certain parts to ourselves?
There’s so much out of your control. Your best bet is to enable your child to make good decisions by themselves. Your ideas of where they should go and what they should do will CRIPPLE their growth and impair their abilities to function as an adult.
Unfortunately, while I’d like to think this is violation happens irresepective of gender, girls find themselves explaining a lot more than boys do. The very rudimentary test I did showed that parents often get riled up when their daughters demand personal space and privacy.
I find it rather strange that instead of teaching children how to preserve their personal space, parents guilt trip children if they try to fight for it.
I have always been very fond of writing my feelings. It is an outlet for my anger and frustration. A couple of girls once read it in school.
Fortunately, not much ever goes on in my life except the scenarios I create in my head but knowing that someone’s been in my head felt like this:
- A strong feeling of embarrassment. You know that feeling when you just want to disappear. The sinking feeling in your chest. The inability to utter a word. I felt all of those things and I responded by saying, “oh, that’s not even my handwriting.”
- The lingering discomfort of being judged. We all have thoughts that we are scared to verbalize. Imagine knowing someone having visited your thoughts.
This information, however irrelavant and inconsequential, was mine and mine alone to keep and I was very much in line wanting to keep it that way.
So often we forget that privacy and secrecy are different things. It’s no secret that you take a dump everyday but it’s private, right?
Normalise asking for information as opposed to fishing for it in notes and messages. Being able to openly converse with anyone is a very important part of relationship training which unfortunately is largely missing from our lives.
Here’s what I have learned about sharing and receiving personal information:
If someone refuses to tell you something, don’t take it personally. Very often, if you’re well intentioned, it has nothing to do with you and everything to do with the teller’s frame of mind. Also, you’re probably not being able to create a conducive enviroment but please chill and please don’t probe.
Very often, I feel I’m boring people by talking about myself. I skip details and everything in between. Do they have the time? The time to allow me to derail because I am not going to say it all at once. The patience to not ask me to get to the point because trust me, I want to get to the point. It’s this point that’s evading me. I know I am blabbering and it’s embarrassing but could you wait a bit. I know I am saying I don’t know but I know and the only thing I don’t know is how to say it succinctly so please just wait.
What exactly are we trying to achieve by snooping?
It is a glaring sign that there are craters in the relationship, that if given the choice, your partner/child/friend/parent would not include you in their lives, that you have not been able to secure their trust, that openly communicating was never an option and that now, by snooping, you are widening the cracks.
If you want to know? Just ask. If you’re scared of the truth. Don’t.
I hope we are able to dignify our relationships with transparency, trust and understanding and if we can’t, I hope we’re able to fix them
