POV You don't open up to people in real life, but you overshare on the internet for everyone to see.

Don't overshare. Everyone is not your friend.

I couldn't help myself from sharing the rest of my special interests with you, just two neurodivergents getting dopamine from oversharing, we were a mess…

Socialite Series: how to not over share

“But how do I not overshare?”

it’s so simple. It’s honestly so simple. Take 45 minutes of your time and just sit and solve this Surface-Vulnerabilities list I’ve made for you.

choose a few typical themes: family, friends, school, line of work, recent holidays, dating scene, hobbies, likes and dislikes, recent experiences, movies, events etc.

imagine you’ve met someone new. Your ideal conversation with them falls under “surface.” This is your basic small talk. You can talk to anyone about this. Let’s say you meet someone called Beatrice. Now, she’s a nice girl but you don’t know that she’s a loudmouth. You told her everything from your surface list and she goes and barks it to someone else. Does it affect you? No. Does it ruin your reputation? No. The surface category is barely 5% of the real you. It doesn’t matter if Beatrice tells the whole world because:

a) nothing vulnerable was said

b) you’ve put your best foot forward

C) by telling everyone this, she’s actually advertising you in the best way

now consider your absolute closest friend. That conversation falls under “vulnerabilities.” These are things you would never tell anyone or maybe just your best friend, these are your worst times, your worst moments. This will never leave your mouth and should not be told to anyone.

I will vent in my diary but still 'accidentally' over share

Yes there's a reason I'm using pictures of Chiaki Kuriyama, hold your horses.

I just finished reading The Life-Changing Magic of Tidying Up, and I was really surprised by it. I was convinced to give it a try when I heard that Marie Kondo found her calling after suffering a cleaning-related nervous breakdown; being as attracted as I am to the relationship between vocation and pathological compulsion, this was the thing that separated me from my money. I had assumed that the book would be a focused manual on a specific activity, like so many self-help books for would-be autodidacts--and it definitely is, Kondo plays the whole thing very straight and you can almost picture her with her little TED Talk headset as she describes her foolproof "only way to" methodology, but sprinkled throughout are little morsels of psychological insight that stopped me in my tracks more than once.

She doesn't lean on the nervous breakdown component of her story, but the astute reader gets a strong sense of a lonely, isolated childhood, enduring feelings of helplessness, and the compulsive turning and returning to cleaning when other aspects of life refuse to get under control. Some of her insights have become common knowledge in the post-Hoarders era, like how clinging to objects reflects an obsession with the past or a fear of the future, and some others are really striking (to me, anyway), like the fact that chronically messy people often lack a feeling of ownership over their possessions and environments. Kondo doesn't insist on her unique mastery of human psychology the way the average culty self-help guru does; she keeps the emphasis on her technique, rather than on her personality, but then late in the game she pulls a reveal like this one:

This is a fascinating thing to unveil after having devoted a couple hundred pages to the importance of what amounts to object empathy. A big part of her process involves talking to things--your house, your stuff, and the things you're throwing away--in a sincere and emotional way that addresses how you feel about them, whether it's the pleasure of how they improve your life, or your gratitude for their past use, including a purpose as simple as helping you clarify what you don't want or need anymore (if ever). I think most everybody experiences some amount of object empathy in childhood, and I guess in adulthood it's often associated with autism, but suddenly it sounds so useful. Being able to respect objects, to the point of sympathizing with them, seems like it can lead inevitably to looking after things properly and taking your relationship to them seriously.

It's crazy how accurately your relationship to your things betrays the quality of your relationship to your very existence. Marie Kondo says that before you start the tidying process, you should ask yourself why you want to tidy to begin with, and then keep questioning your answers until you get something irreducible--which is going to be less like "I want more space" or "I want to be able to entertain at home", and more like something extremely specific about what your ideal lifestyle would look like, which in turn says something extremely specific about what kind of person you want to be. This may seem obvious when you lay it out, but it's not, really. The parent-child relationship that springs up around the latter's messy room is usually characterized along the lines of, the child needs to learn obedience and respect and more mature hygiene practices, when in reality the messy room may say something like: I feel out of control, I feel overwhelmed by life, I feel incompetent, I feel undeserving of a clean room, I feel like it doesn't really matter what happens to me so what's the point of cleaning. I don't feel like I have the authority or talent to create the kind of life I want for myself, so why try?

As a kid I felt a lot of object empathy, which could manifest as both a heartbreaking sympathy and a feeling of threat. We never had any money, and separate of that my parents were anti-materialist hippies, so I could never tell whether we just couldn't afford something, or whether I actually wasn't allowed to have something for some moral reason, or perhaps because I was bad and didn't deserve it. This has affected my lifelong relationship to money, because I developed this mentality that if I got some, then cool, but if I didn't have any, then that was just normal and I couldn't expect to change those conditions under my own power, so who cares I guess. But I digress: I became afraid of my own ability to form attachments, because I didn't have any control over having things, and also because I had a powerful sense of the ongoing degradation of everything around me. I have a shameful memory of one of my mother's friends generously offering me a Boba Fett action figure--a major prize to be sure--and even though I was like 8, I asked the guy directly whether the colored parts of the toy were solid plastic or painted, because I knew that paint would wear and chip and then I would just be left with the feeling of loss. I never really learned how to take care of anything, either; as an adult, I buy weird bullshit to entertain myself, or to build on some fantasy of what my personality supposedly is, but then I constantly lose and break things because that's just how I am, and so I can't properly form appropriate connections to anything. Sometimes I do something destructive or neglectful for no good reason, or rather it's because of some vague moralizing notion that I shouldn't be attached to things anyway. I got my ultimate hero and powercrush David Cronenberg to sign a VIDEODROME poster for me; then in a fit of spite for my own preciousness, I hung it on thumbtacks instead of framing it; now I don't even know where the hell it is, and I still feel terrible about the whole episode 20 years later.

In Takashi Miike's all-ages fantasy THE GREAT YOKAI WAR, a couple of evildoers including the great Chiaki Kuriyama build an army of monsters out of sentient trash: discarded possessions that are full of resentment about being used up and rejected. I found this concept so intense that, actually, I still choke up just trying to describe it, it's so brutal, it's like all of my most primitive fears about my toys having feelings are suddenly real and justified and I can never make up for it. Meanwhile I have had problems with other people who have an intensely dysfunctional relationship with their possessions in the opposite direction of me.

For one major but not at all isolated example, my abusive ex-boyfriend was heavily materialistic, but I don't know what he wanted from that pursuit and I don't think he knew either. He would race to buy the latest comic book collectibles, or deluxe DVDs of key film bro movies, and then almost as soon as the pleasure of buying them had passed, he would try to flip them on eBay and have frightening rages when he inevitably didn't break even. He bought a set of highly desirable designer Godzilla figures from someone I knew who was selling off his father's treasured collection, assuming they were going to a loving home, and then as soon as the initial thrill was gone, my ex was on eBay grumbling about what they were fetching. When we went to San Diego Comic Con, I used what little money I had to surprise him with a limited edition toy from a comic we both loved, and when he saw it, he sighed bitterly and stuff cash into my hand to make me go buy the other one from the set, without saying thank you. Around that time I worked somewhere where we had these big expensive 8-bit Super Mario wall decals, which he demanded for his birthday; after he got them he had some of his shitty yuppie friends over, and they made fun of him for having this kid stuff, so later he yelled at me for gifting him something "pathetic". He traded them for somebody's used flatscreen TV, and then he asked me to get him another set of decals. "I thought you said they were pathetic?" I reminded him, to which he snapped back, "Oh yeah that's right, THEY ARE," as if I were the one who had the dumb idea of offering them to him.

You can probably guess that most of his buying habits were performative, designed to impress people who weren't paying attention and who he didn't even like, but whose perceived status (economic or cultural) made him feel jealous and inferior. However, there is one more thing in play with him: The show Hoarders came out toward the end of our relationship, and I saw him watch it with an intense interest that I had never seen before. It was usually hard to tell if he really enjoyed the things he consumed, or if he was just desperately competing with the rest of his demographic at Knowing Things and Having Opinions, but he had a distinct personal investment in Hoarders. He told me that his parents were Hoarders. I couldn't tell exactly how true that was since he was extremely judgmental of his family, whose ordinariness made him deeply ashamed (as if dentists and teachers are Nothing), but it seemed that there was something to it because they were very mysterious about the fact that I wasn't allowed to visit their home. From the way that my ex poured his attention into that show, with this haunted look about him, I knew that the dysfunctional relationship to things was a part of his very DNA, and a crucial component of the whole entire pathology of his personality. One's obsession or repulsion regarding materialism is definitely not to be dismissed as an innocent quirk unrelated to the core problems of one's soul.

Anyway. Reading the Marie Kondo book was actually a really provocative and enlightening experience for me. I'm planning to do her method as soon as I have time for the sustained marathon she recommends, and I'm really looking forward to what it will reveal even though I know it's going to be a challenge. And also, oddly enough, I've been working through this kind of difficult (annoying but necessary) book about a certain esoteric strain of Virgin Mary iconography, and just this morning I set it down at the end of this particular passage:

I hadn't planned to get into all this today--I didn't even think of it until an hour or so ago--and yet it seems I picked the right day to do it.

This might be a weird question but what are your kinks? At least your favorites to write. I know you have yes and no lists but if I were to ever ask for a writing when requests are open I was thinking of not only indulging myself but indulging you since it doesn't necessarily mean that's what you're into even if you write it! If you're not comfortable with this ask or it's been asked before feel free to ignore. :)

keeping the answer below the cut, its just a bunch of horny rambling, don't mind me.

I don't know if there's something in the water or what- but lately I've been really into master and servant/slave dynamics. Something about blurring the line between objectification and devotion, but like also I love thinking about possessiveness evolving lust into this special new bond between two people.

other faves im really feeling at the moment include-

heirophilia, misogyny kink, virgin breaking, humiliation, choking, kidnapping, fearplay, stalking, exophilia, vampires, being filmed (either knowingly or unknowingly), wedding play (if that's even a thing?), hypnotism/mind break/mind fuck, roleplay, abuse of power, drugging/intoxicated sex

keep everything secret from your loved ones, but overshare to strangers on the internet

I am

- Trying to do my best work in the day job: documenting things, being fully present and consequently feeling emboldened in meetings, coding and helping my team focus on quality efforts.

- Eating healthy, lifting heavier with creatine... I’m fasting, and may do keto for a month for a photo shoot soon. Will stop creatine some weeks before then to lose excess water weight.

- Going to rural Pennsylvania for a wedding, then New York for work. Visiting Philadelphia for the first time and be in DC briefly. (Let me know if there’s anything interesting to check out in these cities!) - Trying to also find the cheapest and most efficient way to move back to California in the summer with my boyfriend. Trying to return and sell items, as moving them would just cost more. I haven’t been this frugal since college... I  thought I had been conscientious with money, but I was wrong. Hard reality check, there is too much worth saving for and I’m truly grateful for what I have, what I continue to use and enjoy. We began using YNAB for finances and it’s been very motivating to budget and let unspent categories accrue over time for a larger purchase; I would recommend.

- Supporting my boyfriend overall as he’s working on some big make or break things, visa applications... Wish us luck.

- Very in love.

"Speak"

"Open up"

"Don't be afraid to tell your truth"

Excuse me but as an oversharing anxiously tilted individual whose thoughts appear sporadically like a fascinatingly evergrowing fungus sometimes ending in me making regretably mean gossiping or useless rumination, what about the power of shuting the fuck up? The art of keeping thoughts to myself? The absolute A ++ of being like, you know what there is nothing to add to this. Who's going to romanticise direct and simple words? Where is my self help guided meditation?

sooo crazy how getting out of a dead relationship will make you so much happier. yeah im alone but at least im not with someone who is embarrassed of me, and im free to be true to myself.

Me after over sharing and trauma dumping: It was a joke...☠️