It’s after 9 a.m. on a Sunday morning and I haven’t spoken or chatted with anyone since 11 p.m. on Friday. This is not a complaint, only an observation. I did, however, respond to an e-mail which has left my brain spinning a bit. In the e-mail a friend and I were discussing oversharing.

A few days ago I made a passing snark on the concept of oversharing. It wasn’t meant to be snarky, but I can see where people who don’t live in my brain would see it as such. I think what I meant to express was frustration in the fact that oversharing is not new but now that a bunch of NYC hipsters are doing it and have coined a term for it, it’s the next big thing.

Fuck that, I thought, I’ve been oversharing on iwilldare.com for nearly eight years. But I don’t think that’s necessarily true anymore. I stopped oversharing long ago but didn’t realize it until last night before bed when “Dear Chicago” shuffled through iTunes and emotionally leveled me like it always does.

“Dear Chicago” is a song that fills me with loneliness and sadness and heartbreak. It reminds me of the foolish things I have done in the name of being loved, or a chance at being loved, or at least fooling myself into thinking that love is possible for me. It makes me wonder about what I say I want and what it is I’ll settle for. It makes me wonder if I say I don’t want to be married because I don’t actually want it or if I say it because I’m afraid to admit that I want something I can’t have.

This song never fails to open an emotional Pandora’s box and 8 out of 10 times that I listen to it I will be reduced to tears. This is not a complaint, only an observation. But it was this song combined with the e-mail conversation that got me thinking last night.

I stopped oversharing long ago, my self-censorship is rampant in these parts and I think it’s what led me to start writing in an old-fashioned paper journal (I’ve just discovered that I can’t use the word ‘journaling’ without stimulating my gag reflex). There are myriad reasons why I stopped oversharing. One being that it’s easier to share the bad, the fear, the loneliness than the good, the wondrous, the beautiful. This led me to worry about how people were viewing me based on the little bit of my life I shared on iwilldare.com. I had more than a few readers worry about my mental health, if I was a danger to myself, and a lot of whom suggested I start taking anti-depressants soley based on what they read here.

But more than what people thought of me, I worried about how people were viewing those that I wrote about. Sharing the TTHM relationship here taught me a lot. I still worry that he has been unjustly vilified for not returning my affections the way I wanted him to. It’s weird because the relationship after the TTHM got nary a mention because I didn’t want that man to suffer the same judgments or deal with the random e-mails the TTHM had to deal with and it upset him that I never wrote about him.

Anyway, as the number of people in my life started reading about my life on the Internet I stopped talking about fear, loneliness, and the mean reds. People in my life are selfish and tend to get offended when you pour your heart out to a computer rather than to them. People in my life are also kind and generous and want to fix whatever it is they perceive as the problem.

The problem is that I don’t want to talk about my loneliness or my fear, I want to write about it. Writing about what is bothering me has been my coping mechanism since I was thirteen. I’m not gonna change it now nor do I want to. Writing about the yuck is not a cry for help, I’m a grownup and a smart woman when I need help I ask for it. I’m not looking for a solution, I’m looking for an outlet.

This not a complaint, only an observation.