Intimacy, literacy, and oversharing

I’m sure many of you girls can relate that the best part of hanging out with your friends is the debrief. Especially after a night out, all of us piling in a roommate’s bed and listening to the chaos of the night before unraveling, hot take, which might actually be more fun than the chaos itself. This past Saturday night, I spent the entire evening running around trying to hunt down my friends and locate their lost phones. Fun fact, on two separate occasions, friends gave me their phones to hold and on both occasions, I forgot I had them. As you can imagine, this created issues. Oh, and I also accidentally crashed a wedding after-party. 

I’m going to take it chill going forward. ;) <- this is a blatant lie

As much as I love oversharing and gossiping to my friends, I’ve found that it causes my qualms and frustrations to linger much longer than they should. If you’re beating a dead horse, you’re revisiting its corpse. So I’ve been experimenting, trying to find a balance of necessary and unnecessary communication. It’s definitely not easy –– Sometimes I love my roommates and best friends knowing my every move. My life, like everyone else’s, has complications and drama and heartbreak. I absolutely have an individuality complex, but I’ve really been coming to terms with the fact that I’m not that special or unique. My tattoos can be found on Pinterest, I don’t really have a personal style, and I wear Brandy, Doc Martens, and Return to Tiffany jewelry. My favorite video games are Minecraft and It Takes Two, I listen to Kanye (The College Dropout and Late Registration almost exclusively his new shit is ass), Tyler, The Creator, and I’ve recently discovered Malcolm Todd. I like collecting cameras and painting and Pinterest is my safe place. There isn’t much more to it; besides the wrinkles in my brain, I know I’m like every other California girl. I think so many people secretly wish their niche lives would be discovered and they could become influencers, do Instagram for a living, and meet celebrities. Besides fantasizing about meeting my celebrity crush Landon Barker, I’m pretty content where I am. I know for absolute fact that I would never survive a day in the spotlight. 

So through this existential crisis, and now that everyone is up to speed on me, I know I’m human, just like everyone else. 

 I’m truly discovering a beauty in privacy. I won’t be a hypocrite because I do have 100 posts on instagram and a million highlights, but it doesn’t need to be stated we can all assume everyone's lives are a bit different than their social persona. I have skeletons in my closet as does everyone else on the planet, and if you say you don’t you’re either boring as shit or lying.

 I had a tipsy conversation with two of my girlfriends at a game night that really resonated with me. One of my amazing friends, whom I’ve been close with since 2018, and I were reflecting on how much bullshit we’ve endured beside each other. They both shared how they love and enjoy my columns, and even though I definitely shitpost, they appreciated hearing my narrative voice. They complimented my writing style, and acknowledged and validated the opinions I share. That is a level of intimacy that no romance could ever bring forth. I’ve realized that being understood by the people I love doesn’t need to be in the literal sense of sharing every detail, good or bad, but it genuinely comes from our ability to connect. 

Genuine intimacy comes from being understood. 

And this conversation, which might have felt menial in the moment, as most drunk talks do, really stuck with me. In my effort to become a more private person, I’ve deleted my private stories on Snapchat entirely. Don’t get me wrong–– I love to be the type of person to share the juicy details; and my life tends to be a shitshow so there’s no shortage, but I realize I feel so much more satisfied in my choices if I reflect on it personally (privately) and move on. I consider myself somewhat self aware, I certainly think way too much, but I recognize I am not a very compassionate or empathetic person. I’m not very capable of understanding my own emotions; let alone anyone else’s. So instead of trying to force myself to obtain character traits I don’t have, I’m finding so much more peace in practicing letting go. And it truly works. The permanence of conversation and sharing a memory makes closure so much more difficult. Having a rough day is full of feelings, but sharing every detail gives it space to exist, within yourself and someone else. (This of course does not apply to true depressive struggles or genuine hardships; those should always be worked through with those you keep close.) So eliminating the permanence of temporary emotions has allowed me to see them as transient. If I’m able to recognize a conflict as presently difficult and bothersome yet temporary, I’m able to experience it in real time as opposed to retroactively, repeating the pain again and again. To many of you, It might sound counter-intuitive, as did I. I’m sure we’ve all heard the Italian phrase, “tutto passa” meaning everything passes, and I think this may be my new perspective model.

Word choice holds so much power. Having a confidant, intimate conversation, pillow talk, heart-to-heart, all of it. Word choice and language we share with others is so intentional, and this is why I don’t believe in the conspiracy of “casual”. Nothing is casual. Please, think about this at a microscopic level:

The action of sharing your thoughts and perspective. 

At the atomic level: 

The neurons in your brain, made of trillions of atoms, transmitting signals through nerve endings you have grown and developed since the day you were born, hard at work to share with another person your unique emotional perspective. Our consciousness, likely the only truly individual part of us. 

I could go on and on and on, but then I’m worried someone will try to check me into a padded room vacation. I’m not there juuust yet, I swear. 

I think having a level of intentionality is something overlooked, but when conquered, truly profound. I’ve tried many times to get into journaling and I’m not with it just yet, so bravo to those who do. To be able to maintain self control to be articulate, resist blurting, and intentional isn’t a skill they just hand out. Especially my generation, where we all got fucked over comprehensively, emotionally, and mentally, so speaking and conversation skills are already a struggle. In my Zoom class this morning, I was really unsettled because I noticed that one of the girls in the class would start her sentences with “cuz” when she got called on. I’m by no means Socrates, look at the way I write. It’s these little cut corners that really add up and create a lack of credibility. When I speak, I want my opinions to be heard and respected; I want them to be articulate and of substance. A bit of a lost art, I fear.

Ggs