It is official, “the cat is out of the bag.” This saying is one that we all have been hearing for as long as people have been telling secrets. But it’s funny how once that bell is wrong it is impossible to unring it. When I was in the second grade my teacher Mrs. Serano taught us a valuable lesson. There were rumors going around the entire school that one girl kissed a boy behind a bush during recess. When a second grader here’s this it spreads faster than the wildfires in California, within the hour it was the topic of the playground. Once my teacher heard about the rumor, and having both of the kids in her class she figured the topic of secrets and rumors needed to be addressed. The next day there were tubes of toothpaste on everyone’s desk. We were all puzzled. She told us all to poke as many holes in the tube as we wanted and squeezed all of the minty freshness out onto paper towels. But what she said next caught all of us off guard. She said, “Now put all of the toothpaste back into the tube”. No one could figure out a way where this could be done. This essentially taught us Communication Privacy Management theory, as well as the importance of trusting who you tell your secrets to. The article To Reveal or Conceal: Using Communication Privacy Management Theory to Understand Disclosures goes into detail regarding when you should and should not share private information.

Communication privacy management theory (CPM) expresses the importance of privacy and how the right to control your own privacy is in your hands until you share with another individual. Private information is any “content of potential disclosures; information that can be owned”(146). This sensitive information is typically surrounded by a feeling that you have the right to own this information. In theory, this process is easygoing and should remain drama free. But it gets complicated when considering the collective privacy boundary or “an intersection of personal privacy boundaries of co-owners of private information, all of whom are responsible for the information”(149). This is crucial when you are communicating private information with your friends because they need to understand their own role in keeping the secrete. If your friend is a shareholder they are more committed to “handling private information according to the original privacy holders rules”(151). People tend to get themselves into trouble because they assume that all of their friends are shareholders disregarding the possibility that people are going to share the information with people who tell everyone.

Let’s face it, we all have those secrets that we do not want certain individuals to know. Whether it is that one thing you did in college that you mom can never know or even something that you did that was funny at the moment but you regret but know you are going to take it to the grave. This private information will always remain private as long as you do not tell a soul. But we are all humans, and people tend to witness these moments, so instead of trusting yourself to take this secret to the grave, you must trust the people who were also there. In the case above, regarding the young children kissing behind the bush, private information was shared with an individual who had no respect for privacy. This individual told one person who told another and the train continued until everyone knew. Their mistake was the fact that they assumed they were a stakeholder, but in reality, they did not deserve to share that information, they should have been a shareholder. When word got out deliberate confidant people sought out to find what everyone was talking about just to say that they knew what happened behind the bush. In hindsight, only two people should have known what happened but one individual told one person they believed they could trust. It just goes to show how once the cat is out of the bag, the individuals who possess this new-found knowledge can either listen to take the role of a shareholder or act against their wishes. Once the cat is out of the bag, it is impossible to put the cat back into the bag.