Oversharing as an abdication of interpretive responsibility
I sometimes use oversharing as a way of not having to take up for myself, an abdication of my power and responsibility to make my own calls, and I think that’s why doing it feels vaguely icky inside.
I’ve always struggled to understand what’s wrong with oversharing. To an honest, sunlight-is-the-best-disinfectant kind of person like me, not withholding painful or personal details seems like a great strategy for avoiding the temptation to lie or spin. I don’t really care if people know more things that I think or that have happened to me. When I share those things freely and don’t treat them like secrets, it feels like an anti-shame practice.
And yet I have for a long time now subtly detected that that there is something wrong about oversharing, at least one kind of oversharing.
My first clue was the way it feels like I’m reaching for a bottle sometimes when I go to overshare—like I’m going to escape something or numb out. It feels reflexive, compulsive. I’ve wondered, what am I trying to avoid?
I think I’ve reached a good hypothesis: sometimes I don’t want to be responsible for interpreting my own feelings/beliefs/experiences and asserting my own conclusion. Oversharing is a way for me to make that interpretive labor the listener’s problem. The mental move feels similar to putting my hands up in a gesture of half-shrug, half-surrender. I think I use oversharing as a way of not having to take up for myself, but instead inviting my interlocutor to come to their own conclusion about my life. It’s a lowkey self-betrayal, an abdication of my power and responsibility to make my own calls, and I think that’s why doing it feels vaguely icky inside.
In many contexts, it’s a virtue to abstain from imposing an interpretation onto the facts. But we don’t call it “oversharing” to have a very explicit gears-level model or to painstakingly lay out the facts of a case without comment. We call it oversharing when the information is personal. I don’t consider most forms of what the general public would consider personal “over”sharing to be problematic, but there is a kind that doesn’t quite sit right with me. It always involves sharing about very high-context domains of my personal life—where almost no amount of sharing to give another person the complete picture—and then expecting them to take those details and come to a conclusion when I myself won’t.
When I give someone a lot of information about my personal life and ask for their take, I’m inviting them to make interpretive moves that ultimately should be mine. So rather than saying something like “I have handled this problem imperfectly, but what I’m dealing with is tough and I think I’ve done a damn good job”, I’m saying “Here are the details— what do you think happened? Do you think I did a good job? You’ll do a better job figuring this out than I will.” In a case like that, by inviting the other person to do the interpretive labor, I’m minimizing the risk that they will disagree with my interpretation. Evincing a position like “I believe in myself and I think I did the best I could with what I had” when other people may still judge me for failing is vulnerable and takes courage. Abdicating on my own interpretation and offering my interlocutors the chance to set the narrative is a way of disarming potential disapproval. 1) I don’t expose any position for them to criticize or disagree with, and 2) I flatter them and invite them to pity me with this gesture of deference and meekness.
Venting for emotional relief is an important sub-genre here. When you tell someone about the worst moments of a fight you had, even if you try to be fair or balanced, you are inviting that person to fill a huge number of gaps in your story, in your relationship with the person you fought with, in how you view yourself and what you can handle, and about what you should do. There’s nothing wrong with seeking understanding or another perspective, but when you put a set of details in someone else’s hands that, by virtue of the angry circumstance in which they were generated, suggest the worst interpretation of the event and the people in question, and then let your interlocutor’s rudimentary interpretation carry the day, you’re abdicating your duty to interpret the incident yourself with a more complete perspective. Mostly I vent purely as act of release, but think I sometimes vent as a way to remain confused by weighing less informed takes and avoid getting clear about how I actually see the situation.
There is more at stake here than the just getting a less accurate interpretation of your own personal data. It’s not nice to leave your listeners to leave them holding the interpretive bag for you. Abdicating interpretive responsibility gives your interlocutor the information that you need help, that you are, at least in this limited sense, their responsibility. Eventually, if you invite people to interpret your life enough times without updating on what they say, they are going to get frustrated. Oversharing as an abdication of personal responsibility is a recipe for frustrating your listeners, because they feel the responsibility you are handing over to them to take care of you but they are powerless to actually fix your situation.
I want to put what I’ve said in context, lest it accidentally be taken as bad advice. I’m not saying that considering someone else’s perspective is an abdication of your own responsibility to reach conclusions. I’m saying that there’s a kind of oversharing, which I sometimes do, that comes down to refusing to stick your neck out and take the risk of owning your own interpretation of things (because it might be unpopular, say, or mistaken or considered wrong by others). But it’s not fair to others to saddle them with this level of responsibility for interpreting our lives, because they can’t do a great job without all the information they don’t have about you and they don’t control what you do. The responsibility for our interpretation of our lives is ours. So if what you’re doing when you share every little personal detail is turning over all your evidence to the court so the verdict is someone else’s, I think you’re abdicating your own responsibility to judge.
This is a very insightful take, especially as I am working through my own calibration on how (and how much) to share the emotionally difficult aspects of my life experience. Your essay almost made me wonder if I am deluding myself about my own potential oversharing.
To explain this more clearly, I spent most of my life chronically undersharing about the most difficult to interpret event of my life--my mom contracting a random unknown virus that caused lesions on her frontal lobe and eventually brain surgery that removed much of her frontal lobe, which happened when she was 34 and I was 6.
My primary defense mechanism was to compartmentalize my emotions so strongly that I did not cry at all from the ages of 11-29. I didn't talk about how to interpret the event, my mom's illness, with anyone except for a couple of very very close friends during this entire period. Something you said in the comments, which is also insightful, is that I had to realize that I was very shame-prone. I didn't feel shame about my mom getting sick, which was outside my control, but I did feel shame that I basically tried to avoid her for all of my childhood after her illness.
I started to share this event and how I felt, slowly at first, but eventually, really just in the last couple of months, I've started to write about my mom publicly. Mostly this is in the form of a couple of memoir type essays that I have written here on Substack. I thought that I was potentially oversharing with these essays. But I now wonder if I was undersharing--in the sense that I am presenting things in a literary fashion that perhaps obscures more than it reveals. Rather than putting the interpretive burden on the reader, this overly stylistic way of sharing refuses to grant them the courtesy of doing their own interpretation at all. Perhaps the best way to reconcile this is to embrace that this sharing--whether over or under--is more an exercise in literary writing than the act of sharing as you are, I think, presenting it here.
Thanks for this essay, which is provoking me to take a look at my own sharing from a different angle!
This was an interesting read! It made me think of other kinds of oversharing that I've encountered and struggled with:
The first is oversharing as a way of extracting emotional support. Let's say you're meeting a new neighbor, and they share their bitterness over a divorce they've recently gone through, or detail the bad parenting decisions they make when they drink too much. I think this often happens with people who don't have lasting, intimate relationships because they struggle with boundaries. Instead, when they meet someone who is nice and agreeable, the over-sharer divulges things that make them feel uncomfortable. Since the audience is nice and agreeable, the over-sharer knows they will be heard, and get some awkward pity / sympathy. Maybe a good term for this is "dumping"?
The other kind of over-sharing is like a bid for attention. Maybe you have an aunt that's generally withholding, and does not take an interest in your feelings. However, the aunt loves to gossip, so she gets really excited and interested whenever you spill the T. In a situation like this, you might feel the urge to overshare with your aunt, because it will make you feel likeable and interesting, and worthy of your aunt's attention. You might share intimate things that you later regret, or share private things about your partner that they later get upset at you about. This makes me think of a dog performing "tricks for treats", since your aunt has conditioned you to perform a certain behavior for a reward.