Life & Therapy

I have the Internet on my mind lately, and today I am thinking about how much of our lives we share with the public via social media and blogging. I often struggle with how much to share about my life and my children, and how much to keep private. Today I read a blog post by a woman who had read her five year old daughter’s diary, felt moved by its contents and then shared them online by publishing photos of her words on an extremely popular “news” website. I will not link to this particular blog because I feel strongly that this should not have been made public, and is a pretty clear example of egregious over sharing.

Egregiousness aside, this article did make me think about just what might have inspired this mother to share her daughter’s most private thoughts with everyone in the world.  My guess is that she felt incredibly moved by what she found in her daughter’s diary, perhaps relieved that it was full of positivity, and deeply touched by the fact that her daughter is so adorable.  These are all understandable feelings, and she apparently could not contain them, so shared them with the world.

Many of us feel big feelings that are hard to contain, feelings that are very difficult to sit with, to hold, to feel. So we give them away in the form of sharing.  In the age of social media, we can share things before we even get a chance to feel them. Some feelings need our containment, need some time alone with us before we give them to the world, and some things just need to stay with us without ever being shared. It is hard to know which ones to contain and which ones to share because strong feelings move us. Anything that moves us, by definition, makes it hard for us to sit still, but sitting still with the most moving emotions can be an incredible, life-affirming experience.

Perhaps if the diary-sharing woman could have sat with her big feelings about her daughter, kept them to herself, she could have enjoyed them without anyone’s opinions intruding. Instead, she shared them in an article and the comment section is full of reactions (mine included) and many of them are not positive. She posted her own rather defensive comment about it all. Sharing her feelings online changed her experience of them completely. Now, instead of getting to feel the bliss she feels about her daughter’s sweetness (and hopefully some guilt about invading her privacy), she has hundreds of comments that she is defending herself against.

While she may be fine with this and feel that she did the right thing, I am guessing that many of us would not. I often wonder how many felt experiences I miss out on when I rush to Facebook about them. I have been noticing the moments that I automatically want to share, and instead of sharing them, allowing myself to sit with them for a bit. Yesterday, my daughter was being ridiculously cute on a walk of ours and I noticed myself composing my Facebook status about things she was saying and doing. I paused and realized that, of all the people who should hear about how cute my daughter was being, the number one person was…my daughter. Every time I noticed myself Facebooking about her cuteness in my mind, I told her how cute she was being. I enjoyed our private little moments so much more than I would have had I shared them with the bigger world. I still plan on sharing the adorable and less adorable moments on Facebook, but I am planning on letting myself have a bit more alone time with them first.