who has earned the right to hear my story?

I’m back to reading The Gifts of Imperfection by Brene Brown, and at the end of the chapter entitled The Things That Get in the Way, she writes that our stories are not meant for everyone, that hearing them is a privilege.

Despite the fact that I’m throwing my story out here in the blogosphere, and allowing anyone who wanders by to read/hear my story, I completely agree with what Brene Brown says.

As my marriage was crumbling, and I was desperately trying to shore up the foundation by myself, I gave my husband the privilege of reading my story simply because he was my husband, and I thought it would help our marriage if he knew my story. He abused that privilege by sharing my struggles, pain, and devastation with his other woman/girlfriend/homewrecking whore. His justification for that was that I was already sharing it all, so why couldn’t he? He also said as soon as he did it, he knew it was wrong. But he didn’t tell me that he did it until months later, when I caught him still cheating, still having his affair, and still looking me in the eye and lying to me.

The outrage I felt upon finding out that I had been sharing my story with the whore that was destroying my family was exactly because she wasn’t privileged to hear my story. She’s the last person on earth I would have chosen to share it with. The audacity and stupidity of my then-husband for thinking this whore was good enough to learn how I feel still astonishes me. That I thought my then-husband was worthy of the privilege of hearing my story astonishes me even more.