I Almost Shared My Deepest Suffering With You: A Cautionary Tale
A few thoughts on a popular trend
Resist the Confessional Writing
The temptation is strong, to bare our deepest wounds, expose our deepest agony, yank out our guts for an audience of strangers.
I've teetered on the brink of this, spurred on by writing workshops led by celebrated authors who propose that our suffering is a gold mine of content. Ghosted. Fired without warning. Abused in childhood. Falsely accused of hate crimes. Violently bullied behind a large garbage compactor on school grounds.
But it's not just about suffering. Go ahead - hand over your most intense feelings of love. I pen deeply personal letters to my twin daughters each year on their birthday. I do this in case something happens to me - they should know how much they mean to me. Watching them read these letters, understanding their significance, creates everlasting moments. Which leads to my embarrassing moment only a week ago. I took a blurry picture of the letters, almost posted them. Until I asked myself - what the fuck are you doing? This is not for the masses. It’s for me and my girls. That’s the entire audience.
The audience capture. Intense competition in the attention economy. A need for significance. An unhealthy triad of influences.
Estranged father dies. Write a post immediately.
Receive a cancer diagnosis. Inform strangers online before calling your family
A book deal or grant application is rejected. Do not process the emotions. Must. Post. Online. Now.
Battling with irritable bowel syndrome. Ask for and share the gory medical photographs. Think of the number of comments…as they wonder is it an upside down avocado or unkempt intestine?
Maybe, just maybe, this is what close friends are for. Therapists. Family, biological or chosen. Until you’ve spoken to them, consider staying away from the keyboard. This is not a time urgent situation. Pour wet cement between your fingers, and let them dry. Mute the words until you are with someone who earned access to your deeper side.
You don’t need to surrender your humanity for the fleeting thrill of online engagement.
Intervene with Confessional Writing
But another side of me questions why we might want to share the darkest corners of our lives.
We want our pain to be witnessed.
We want to be seen.
The sting of suffering, feeling alone, and unseen is too intense.
Know the Underlying Motivation
We can work with both of these perspectives. Resist the confessional writing urge for extrinsic reasons - to build a platform, to satisfy other people’s morbid curiosity, to make money. Recognize the psychological benefits of journaling, and if it helps you process, cope, recover, rebuild, help someone else, or anything else, then do whatever you must do for you.
Just pause and consider your motivation.
And treat everyone you've never met in this crossroads with compassion. Assume intrinsic motivation until proven otherwise…and let them know they’re seen. We are all a bit broken, some of us more than others. It's hard to despise a stranger reaching out into the blank screen abyss for some kind of connection without knowledge of who’s in their corner.
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Dr. Todd B. Kashdan is an author of several books including The Upside of Your Dark Side (Penguin) and The Art of Insubordination: How to Dissent and Defy Effectively (Avery/Penguin) and Professor of Psychology and Leader of The Well-Being Laboratory at George Mason University.
Read Past Issues Here Including:
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In today's information age, curiosity is king. Think about all those websites that tweak their headlines and ads to make you click (17 Divorced People who Remarried Their Ex Revealed What Happened After!). Meanwhile, companies claim to share information—like drug or financial disclosures—but do it in a way that doesn't draw your attention. Consider this the power of selectively keeping people incurious.
I'll preface this with - I haven't posted anything yet.
It is something that I feel creates distress and internal conflict when I consider going public and whether it would help. In my case it was I was looking to be heard, that my experience was not ok, that what I was advocating for what was right, and that I shouldn't have had to deal with what I dealt with and had the additional layers of context that were negatively impacting my life. I was told by an authority that I was the problem - which was a good lesson that just because people form a perception of you, doesn't make it true. By keeping quiet I feel like I have been silenced.
Your book Todd came out after my experience and I recognised that I had not set up my cause for success, I didn't have support and I was pushing against the status quo. I also had friends with similar experiences who wanted to put the past behind them and refused to be involved so it felt like I was fighting the good fight by myself. I'm really trying this year to pick my battles.
Once again, a mindfully, brilliant, take a pause, and use your critical, thinking, awareness, and acceptance that not everybody in the world wants to hear about your irritable bowel syndrome! Well done. This post is a gigantic keeper.