Oversharing, What Is It?

Is sharing each small pettiness an act of oversharing, or the opposite?

This week, while searching for the exact wording of a tweet I saw months ago, I stumbled upon a corner of the internet I never knew existed: a place to rehabilitate the oversharer. I was particularly struck by one post on Howcommunicationworks.com titled “Self-Disclosure in Personal Relationships: How to Stop Oversharing.” It seeks to counsel those who vomit their “childhood trauma” or “deeply intimate facts” without confirmation that the stranger upon whom they are vomiting wants to know or has interest in safeguarding such disclosures. The whole thing struck me as funny, that a person who exhibits this behavior would be inclined to look for solutions on the internet, and that simply reading that a lot of people don’t give a shit about your private life would be enough to dissuade the oversharer from their reckless transparency. But then it occurred to me. Maybe, just maybe, some people out there saw ME as one of those oversharers. Suddenly, I felt the need to defend myself against their (your?) misjudgment! Fools! I wanted to say. If you think a messy period or a healthy dose of parental resentment counts for deeply intimate facts, you have no idea how deep these still waters run! Needless to say, it hurt my feelings. But the solution was obvious: I needed to tell you much MUCH more, to give you a little perspective on how little I’d been telling you before.

Am I joking? Reader, I DON’T KNOW. What I can say is that I find it far easier to amplify the small than to give the big its proper due. There are myriad reasons for this disinclination toward sincerity, one being the threat that what’s truly precious to me simply won’t translate. I recently read Argonauts by Maggie Nelson, and I was annoyed by her description of the birth of her son, so violent and holy and special to her. Did this Maggie Nelson bitch think she owned the ordinary miracle? I’d done the dang thing twice. Did anyone need to hear about my botched epidural, my son’s vacuum extraction, the smell of the poorly chosen fish tacos my husband brought back to our windowless hospital room? No. (But The Reader should know that during my first delivery, after three hours of pushing, my husband told me I was “doing it wrong”. Can the human imagination conjure a more egregious example of mansplaining?) Every person who’s delivered a baby has a birth story, and while priceless its owner, the resale value is for shit. The market is simply too saturated.

Poppin’ bottles after poppin’ out my first progeny, 2019

But what if the big doesn’t feel big enough? I’ve been wondering about this recently, as the year winds its way toward the first anniversary of my sister’s death. Last November, when it happened, many wonderful friends reached out to offer their support if I wanted to talk about it. I did not want to talk about it. I felt like if I talked to those who knew my sister, I would have to contend with the anticipation of her death reflected back at me. My sister was only 48, but after a lifetime of substance abuse and mental illness, how shocked could I really be that she was gone? If I talked to those who didn’t know her, how could my grief possibly measure up to what they’d expect from a now sister-less sister? My sadness felt both outsized and underwhelming. It felt inappropriate, and best kept to myself.

But while you can’t really do much except sit with death, death doesn’t feel like something you should sit with. So instead of talking to my friends, I went back to therapy. My sister held our focus for a session or two, then we settled back into the well-worn worries of my career angst and body dysmorphia. Who knew such patterns of self-loathing could feel like a warm blanket?! (James Clear, that’s who. That guy literally wrote the book on habits.) My therapist suggested I join a grief group, so I did, full of kind and supportive people who’d also recently lost siblings. But my grief felt mismatched there as well. I couldn’t help thinking about the black hole losses — husbands and wives, children, parents when you’re young — with the gravitational pull to suck you in and tear you into the smallest subatomic particles of yourself. Approximately what size should the grief of losing a sibling be? Bigger than a friend. But certainly survivable. Show me someone who couldn’t go on living because they lost their sister. I stopped going to the grief group. Spending that hour and a half every other week with my children feels less cathartic, but more like a place I belong.

Me and my sister, Gillian, late 2015?

Any death needs a place to be put, doesn’t it? I thought I’d write a book about my sister. I flew back to Denver to interview people who loved her, who seemed more entitled to be devastated by her exit. I interviewed my parents and my sister’s partner of twenty years and didn’t learn much new about my sister. In their stories, she was the woman I recognized: willfully immature, vain, arrogant, determined to make her life harder than it had to be. Also funny. Smart. Stomach iron-clad enough to stitch up a lover’s stab wound with a sewing needle and some dental floss. Too scared of leaving her house to join us for oyster stew on Christmas Eve.

Sometimes I wonder if the universe has portioned out everything good in my life against what my sister didn’t get, so that the karmic sum of us adds up to zero. That sounds sad but maybe it’s overly optimistic. It presumes there’s a balance to the universe in the first place.

Putting small things into words can create connection - The Reader recognizes a feeling or a moment that seemed too insignificant to dwell in til they discovered the writer was dwelling in it too. In my experience, little can be translated from the life’s monumental joys and tragedies. An extraordinary love rendered ordinary when you name it. Or else the dull, incurable ache that a life could have gone differently, but didn’t.