‘Oversharing helped me get through dark situations’
This morning, I posted a deeply unflattering picture of my red, sweaty post-workout face to Instagram, before live tweeting a completely ridiculous argument I was having with my husband about towels. (I mean, everyone knows you’re not actually supposed to use your nice towels, right? You roll them up and put them in a wooden basket and pretend you live in a hotel, while drying yourself with a dark brown Primark number streaked with fake tan marks.) I am a chronic over-sharer, and I always have been. When it comes to social media, almost nothing about my life is off limits.
People think of this as being a defining millennial trait, and I do think that people of my generation have grown up feeling much more comfortable sharing every banal detail of life. We were raised on reality shows like The Hills and Big Brother, and we know that nothing is more bizarrely fascinating than watching two strangers having a revealing conversation about relationship woes – or, indeed, getting a vajazzle. Sharing information has been normalised, and it seemed logical for me to start as soon as I had the chance.
I began using Facebook as a student, where I fell in love with it because it gave me the chance to describe my hangovers in Dickensian detail. (“Daisy is regretting every Jaegerbomb – she feels as though she’s been put in a sack, rolled down a hill and trampled by 600 horses.” I think this must have been around the time that I was studying Tennyson’s Charge of the Light Brigade.)
I’ve always believed that nothing is funnier than real life, and oversharing online gave me a chance to turn my biggest mistakes and greatest humiliations into jokes. (“Daisy has just fallen over a dog.”) Oversharing is the opposite of bragging, and it gives us the chance to show we have a sense of humour about ourselves. I suspect that Nora Ephron would be using social media enthusiastically if she were still with us. Her famous line, “When you slip on a banana peel, people laugh at you. But when you tell people you slipped on a banana peel, it’s your laugh,” defines my whole approach to Facebook and Twitter.
However, social media has helped me to get through dark, difficult situations, too. For a long time I tried to focus on the funny, and I’d only share positive stories, but when I started to open up about experiencing anxiety and depression, I was overwhelmed by the number of people who started online conversations with me about their own experiences. Simply sharing the way I felt about my anxiety was a great relief. It wasn’t a secret any more, and I felt that I was able to manage it better when it was out in the open.
I wonder whether that’s the biggest part of the way the millennial relationship with privacy has evolved. As a generation, we have plenty of struggles with money, work and mental health. Growing up in the Nineties and early Noughties, the pressure to be perfect was overwhelming – everyone seemed groomed, glossy and fabulous. I wonder whether our tendency to overshare is a reaction to a build-up of decades of perfection. We’re not just asking people to look through the window on our lives, we’re opening it wide – and the fresh air feels good.
What I love most about oversharing is that it gives us autonomy, and the chance to be the author of our own stories; we can take charge of our lives, and how they’re viewed. This is why the one aspect of my life that I’ll never share is the time I spend hanging out with my adorable niece and nephew. I know the baby photos would rack up likes and follows, but they’re not mine to share. When they grow up, they can decide how they will present their lives to the world, and I don’t doubt that they’ll be part of a sharing generation, too.