On Oversharing

I wrote last week’s newsletter about my pregnancy a week before I needed to post my next newsletter. By the time it came to post, I didn’t want to share the pregnancy with strangers (and worse, friends I hadn’t yet told). By the time I realized I felt this way, it was time to post. The options were: (a) don’t post, (b) post, or (c) quickly make something else and post that. “C” is my usual MO: do, make or say something, realize people will notice or have noticed, feel self-conscious, rush to cover my tracks. My life—the social part, at least, and isn’t that all of it? —is a constant push and pull between wanting to express myself and not wanting to be seen, maybe because I am unusual-brained and know that many of the things I naturally express are the wrong things. The feeling of covering my tracks is a neurotic feeling in that it never ends. I never do it well enough, I need to always try harder. A bit like starving oneself or obsessing over one’s outfit for hours before leaving the house.

I’ve found that the best thing for me is to express myself and ignore the self-consciousness blowback. Not because I don’t think there are things that should be kept private, but because, like dieting, I think I don’t know how to use my urge for privacy in moderation, and therefore shouldn’t be allowed to use it at all. Besides, my way of expressing myself is a performance, like a t-shirt with a naked torso printed on it. And what’s less revealing than that?

Neurodiversity people (by which I mean the autism/ADHD Tiktok influencers whose accounts I get fed on Instagram) use a term called masking. Masking is when you learn to perform normalcy to fit in in the world. In an autistic person’s case, this might include learning to make eye contact, make conversation about “normal” things as opposed to monologuing about rocks, smile, not fidget with your hands constantly. I’m flattening things here, but it seems to me that masking is generally viewed as a bad, self-destructive practice, which causes people to hide their true selves from everyone in their lives, including themselves.

My experience is a little different. For me, I think hiding and performing are two different things. I’ve been intensely self-conscious almost from birth, and I think that has been destructive for me. Performing is something I learned gradually, mostly in my twenties. I learned small talk from a pathological liar (or incredible storyteller) I knew in college, whom I got to be friends with for a couple months because we were the only two students from our college on an exchange program, and it took her a while to find new friends in France. Realizing talking didn’t require you to tell the truth (because who can ever tell the truth? Silence is the only actual truth; rocks are the only honest beings) was a revelation to me and freed me up instantly. Eye contact has been harder, and I’m still not great at it. The only times I wish I were better at it are when baristas think I’m being dismissive of them.

When my friend talked, she told stories about herself and people she knew (and said she knew). Her single aim was to entertain. The two ingredients to entertainment, for her, were deep truths and some made-up things, too. I once overheard her telling someone a story about how I stood silently at a party for an hour, wearing a voluminous black coat, before suddenly turning a cartwheel. This wasn’t true (it was an anecdote I’d read about Max Beckmann), but it also was. She’d captured something about me. She was a brilliant conversationalist. She was a natural memoirist. She taught me how to talk. And she taught me how to write, too. When I started posting on Instagram, the things I posted were true rather than factual. I was coming out of hiding, while keeping my real little facts to myself (because who wants my little facts anyway?). I worry sometimes that my art is just a form of masking—of pretending to connect—and that I could be using my art, instead, to truly connect. But I’m not sure that’s true. Rocks are honest, but they do not connect.  

For paid subscribers, some pregnancy cartoons I’ve been drawing these past few months and keeping very demurely to myself (this pregnancy has been characterized mostly by gluttony and tenderness towards dogs).