"How do you distinguish between vulnerability or oversharing?"
But who gets to decide which is which?
Love notes from Siel is a weekly newsletter from Siel, who’s currently traveling around the world. If you love it, subscribe for free.
Once a month, I answer a question from a reader. Have a question? Ask!
Hi Siel —
Being a writer and sharing your writing takes guts, and I love how personal you get in your writing. Where does your bravery come from? How do you distinguish between vulnerability or oversharing which may affect others' perceptions of you?
Thanks for doing what you do :)
Sherry
Dear Sherry —
Once, some years ago, I went on a date with a guy I met on a dating app.
I forget what app it was — that part isn’t important. What’s important is that this date happened at a time when I’d recently stopped drinking, which means it happened at a time when I was extremely self-conscious of my not-drinking.
I’d stopped drinking because for a large chunk of my twenties, I’d drunk a lot, and it had made me unhappy. Not drinking was slowly making me happier. But simultaneously, the fact of my not drinking weighed heavily on me through every social event. I evaded questions about alcohol. I tried to disguise club soda as gin and tonics, cranberry juice as cape cods. You could say I behaved as if I had a shameful secret — a secret I was desperate to hide.
So that’s where my sense of self was when I arrived at this date, which was luckily in the middle of a weekday, an unlikely time for drinks. I sat across the table from a good-looking guy a few years older than me whom I thought I wanted to like me.
We started talking. He had an Eastern European accent and a cocky vibe, he knew he was attractive. He told me he traveled a lot, he had a very successful import-export business, he enjoyed his work. I smiled, I flattered, I joked. I told him I’d considered a career in business, but that taking an intro to financial accounting class in college had bored me to tears, plus I hadn’t been particularly good at it, so I’d majored in English. I asked if he’d been a business major.
That’s when the tenor of the conversation — and his brash self-confidence — suddenly shifted. For some reason, he didn’t answer me directly, he said something else about his business. This avoidance on his part piqued my interest. I asked him again, directly, what he’d studied in college, and he circumvented the question again.
I understood then that he hadn’t gone to college, but didn’t want to say so.
Realizing this changed the way I saw him, he didn’t seem so confident anymore, though he kept talking with the same bluster. I felt a flash of pity for him, not because he didn’t have a college degree, I didn’t care about that, but because he was ashamed enough about that lack he felt compelled to try and hide it.
And it was then that I realized I shouldn’t try to hide my not drinking. Attempts to hide it hid nothing, it only highlighted and double-underlined the fact — and revealed that I was ashamed to boot.
This is what I thought about while my date continued to drone on about himself, about his second home in Madrid, his apartment in London. In the future, I should just lead with my not drinking, I thought. Who would be put off by that anyway? Just the alcoholics I wanted to avoid.
That’s what I was still mulling over when he suddenly asked me what I was looking for in a relationship. I said something meaningful, that was my go-to answer on dates, and he said he wanted that too, but also that he didn’t want to get married, he didn’t believe in it.
“I’m glad you told me that,” I said, “because that’s exactly what I do want.” “Oh yes?” he said, like he was surprised. “Yes,” I said. “And soon.” This wasn’t true, but in that moment, I no longer wanted to cater to this kind of man, the cocksure type that expected you to say, yeah, I’m not looking for anything serious either, tell me more about your place in Madrid, I’d love to go there with you this weekend or the next, should I pack lingerie, do you prefer black or red.
No. If I was going to spend time with someone, I wanted them to be kinder, more humble, honest.
I finished my coffee. “Ready?” I said, lifting my purse, and he got up reluctantly. He offered to walk me to my car, insisted when I demurred, so we walked together the two blocks to the parking lot. When we got there, he asked, “What are you doing this weekend?” I told him I didn’t see the point of our going out again, we wanted such different things.
“We could still hang out, see each other for a while,” he said.
I smiled. “What would be the point?” I asked. I told him I hoped he found what he was looking for, and drove away.
I wanted to share this story with you, Sherry, because your question reminded me of me: The me that felt — and sometimes still feels — compelled to censor large parts of myself in an attempt to shape others’ perceptions of me.
I think what I’m saying is this: The important question for me, as a person and a writer today, is not how do I distinguish between vulnerability or oversharing. Rather, it’s who distinguishes between vulnerability or oversharing.
Who gets to decide what’s okay for me to say, to write? Is it me? Is it the people who love me and are willing to indulge me? Is it the people who, whether or not they like me or even my writing, feel nonetheless compelled to read my work, sometimes judging it harshly? Or is it the cocky stranger at a cafe in Santa Monica bragging about his second home in Madrid?
I think your question is about writing, but also about life, and about our relationships with people. Namely: If we reveal more of ourselves, will people decide they like us less? If I share too much, will they run away?
My sense is that yes, some will run away. And that’s a good thing — you want some, maybe even a lot, of people to run away.
I say this even though I understand the place where your question is coming from. There’s a lot of oversharing in our world today. I see a lot more of it on social media than in books, but memoirs and works of autofiction can certainly put me off too. There are books, in short, in which authors reveal parts of themselves that make me go ugh, why. Most of these are books by male authors full of braggadocio — Emmanuel Carrère’s constant talk about his girlfriends’ beauty and his own sexual prowess comes to mind — but there are books by women that bug me too. Did Rachel Cusk have to write a memoir in which she details the many base and selfish ways she behaved toward her husband during their marriage and divorce? Or Heather Havrilesky a book of essays that exposes the contempt and disdain she seems to have for so much of the world?
Perhaps not, but despite those books — and maybe a little because of them — Rachel and Heather are some of my favorite writers. I still follow their work. Other readers actually love the books I just mentioned.
Maybe it comes down to this: If you’re going to write, or speak, or even just be — if you’re going to dare to be a human in this world — there will be moments when you’ll come across to others as too much, as someone who’s revealing far more of herself than they want to see.
But what do you really gain by not sharing what you have to say?
And should you end up oversharing, will you really lose anyone worth keeping?
And by trying to avoid oversharing, will you ever successfully hide anything from anyone anyway?
Thanks for the kind words, Sherry. Wish I could give you more answers than questions —
Love,
Siel
Three links you might love — mothers and daughters edition:
When your mom takes out student loans in your name to feed her gambling addiction. “The future that debt chose for me — indeed the future it chooses for many people — included a lot of shame, confusion, and pain.”
When your mom steals your identity to pretend she’s a college student. “She seemed like a typical college undergraduate, with student loans, boyfriends and a job. But according to prosecutors, she also happened to be a woman in her 40s who had used the Social Security card information of her estranged daughter to get a driver’s license, enroll in a university and obtain financial aid.”
When your mom dies and you write an obit that goes viral. “Because she was my mother, the death of zaftig good-time gal Renay Corren at the impossible old age of 84 is newsworthy to me, and I treat it with the same respect and reverence she had for, well, nothing.”
Love, love, love this!!
This is one of my favorite love notes yet!