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yvannairieIt just occurred to me that I'm not Okay with the whole "queer culture/gay-to-gay friendship necessarily contains oversharing as a component of it"
I'm no longer okay with the idea of other queer people or people who share my queer trauma being somehow more reliable and trustworthy with the intimate details of my life.
If I'm oversharing, that is a problem! That is a symptom! I am explicitly doing it against my will as a trauma response to having my feelings invalidated if I don't go into excruciating details on their origins! And I'm starting to wonder if the word "overshare" means something else to most people, because I've also seen people use "overshare" to mean "discuss their emotions and experiences to any degree".
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Date: 7/2/21 15:21 (UTC)no subject
Date: 7/2/21 17:52 (UTC)Yeah, relatedly, the person I think overcorrects into "sorry for oversharing" when they talk about their life is Finnish, and admittedly I don't really know what kind of oversharing the other people who go "haha fifteen minutes into a gay friendship we're already talking about how much we hate our parents" actually mean.
I just find the general implication of "queer friendships have more liberal boundaries" uncomfortable at this point. Probably something to do with me realising how many toxic friendships where it wasn't my fault this time I've been in in the past.
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Date: 8/2/21 14:22 (UTC)no subject
Date: 7/2/21 15:42 (UTC)OH GOD YES THIS.
2: On the "does oversharing mean something else to most people" thing, I genuinely (as someone who has this problem) think that a lot of people are overcorrecting in this regard. Either they had a problem in the past with oversharing or they were told that they were oversharing in response to talking about themselves, so they've taken the response of just not talking about their own emotions/experiences at all.
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Date: 7/2/21 16:02 (UTC)I think it might be a response to a different trauma. I feel like in my experience queer people are often told "ew, TMI, nobody wants to hear that" whenever they say anything about their queerness, even when a cishet would have easily gotten away with saying an analogous thing about their own sexuality or gender.
(every once in a while I brush up against a group of straight people discussing whom they find hot, and it's like, holy shit! you guys are, just, casually talking about what you find sexually attractive?! and nobody shuts you down?!?!)
I struggle with this a lot, with distinguishing what *is* oversharing, from what *ought not be considered* oversharing but *will* be by my biased audience, from what my audience is fine with. And of course--making things more difficult--different audiences vary in what they're fine with.
(Neurodivergence makes this *worse* for me, because autism means I generally cannot tell when someone is giving me a Look: the best I can do is be intellectually aware that this is a situation where people are going to Look at me (and I won't know if that intellectual awareness is wrong! if I think an audience is hostile and it's not, I'm probably going to *keep* thinking it's hostile!), or else be explicitly told that people are uncomfortable with me.)
Queer people *would* presumably tend to be more accepting of non-normative sex/gender talk on average, and between that and having everything to do with big swaths of your life and mind get called "oversharing", there's absolutely a temptation to go "alright then, I'll *go* to hell" and embrace the "oversharing" label.
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Date: 7/2/21 18:05 (UTC)This is a really insightful answer, although for additional context I gotta add that what got me thinking about this was looking at how most of my queer friends I've found through fandom, and most of my fandom friends are queer, and how fandom, right now, definitely isn't more "accepting" right now what with the New Satanic Panic going on, and how I just suddenly got this horrible sense of all these young people learning bad boundaries b/c the scenes they hang out in tell them that's "normal", and then going on to exercise those bad boundaries in other scenes.
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Date: 8/2/21 20:06 (UTC)It's definitely an "embracing the oversharing label in general," at this point, than a perception that oversharing as a norm is something that is good and right. There has absolutely been an evolution over the years to how I got here, and where I started was somewhere on the "oversharing straight up is a good thing actually" to be fair. I have my own relationship to the post (I do actually find it kinda relatable! However, I guess the key thing to me here that I feel is being ignored is like... you know you can turn that off right? Like it's a thing you can consciously do. I saw this post the day you made it and I've sat on replying to it, for example, and I'm very stressed about tone here but like. Idk if I meet someone and I do not like them I can just be like hmm, no thank you. I very much decide what I disclose.)
Anyway, the actual *reason* I reblogged the post is that my wife made her first irl friend since college. The friend is also trans, and importantly the only other trans person in her work group, which provided a sort of instant solidarity. My wife was never out in high school, but I was, and like, when you are out in high school in queerphobic areas the community can be toxic as fuck but it's also incredibly tight knit. You're all everybody has! Those connections tend to form lightning quick. Which was basically my wife's experience. The moment they recognized each other as the only trans people there they were reaching out to each other. So I reblogged the post because I was teasing my wife.
I don't... think that urge is a bad thing, necessarily. It's an attempt to keep us safe in dangerous environments, certainly. But also yeah, it does mean you can end up with friendships that are weirdly enmeshed and have poor boundaries and communication skills. The bad part has more to do with how it's done, since like, I think queer specific groups at a workplace can be a great idea.
So I mean, I do actually think that the social context the post is speaking to is less about how queers speed run friendships and more about how queer people generally occupy unsafe social positions and we know this and we tend to band together when we see each other for safety, even now, and the easiest way to form social bonds is... to speed run friendship, by going through emotional disclosure really fast. So like? I *don't* think this works out well online, for example, because this is a response to danger. (ALSO there's a different trauma response going on in here at the same time; anyone who's ever experienced coercion to *be silent* about their trauma is likely to experience a period where they *can't shut up* about what happened to them, and the silencing that many people experience to not get murdered for being queer, among other things, like. counts for that. so! confounding factors, yay.)
OTOH, my experience has been as an adult who's gotten extensive therapy? Yeah, I'm very upfront about being married to a woman and I'm resigned to *presenting* as a woman for the foreseeable future, and that still gets treated as TMI. Or, in some ways worse, that gets treated as carte blanche to *ask me* invasive and TMI questions. Like, I end up telling people a lot that I, personally, don't mind doing community ambassador work, but they need to understand that most queer people just want to live their lives and *don't* want to answer their questions.
>>because I've also seen people use "overshare" to mean "discuss their emotions and experiences to *any* degree".
Yeah, I live in an older, conservative area that thinks this is still the 80s and that everybody would rather be institutionalized or quietly drink themselves to death ("with dignity," per my uncle) before ever doing that. This is one of the reasons why I, personally, like being open about mentally ill at this point, since I can get away with it. It's definitely oversharing by the community standards in which I live, but it's not like, emotionally confiding in people, it's telling them I have ADHD and letting them ask me 101 questions. Tbh I mostly field like, work and school questions. I like doing ambassador work! But these aren't, like, friendships, and this isn't like, disclosing intimate details of my past or my childhood trauma or w/e, *either* so. In no way does this count, I feel, as like what the post was talking about, but it IS considered* to be oversharing by the community norms where I live because it's admitting to a mental illness.
*I'm sorry to be putting this in a footnote. It is considered oversharing, but *individually* people are rarely like "ew why would you say that!" That has actually happened to me though, but interestingly, it was when I was telling my grandmother about me telling other people that I have ADHD, so, her internalized reaction to the expectation of rejection. On the whole, people are actually really great about it! There's the whole, horrible, untapped circle of people who are struggling that it's always good to be able to point to other resources, and the people who are trying to learn more to support people in their lives, and just generally the people who just hadn't realized that like, for example, ADHD is something an adult can have. Also this isn't like, a thing I just tell everyone; if it comes up, it comes up. I don't make a *point* of telling people, I just also don't go out of my way to *not* tell people.
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Date: 9/2/21 05:34 (UTC)Hi, Idiomie! Yeah, that's possible, I've seen a few people who I generally get a "good with boundaries" vibe from reblog the version of the post that talks about mummified saint body parts or something, that's really what triggered my questioning of whether it's just some specific subculture thing I don't get b/c the other major audience of it seems to be the kind of people that now get a "oh, you're sweet but we should never be friends, that will end badly" response from me now.
There's also been a few posts doing the rounds lately about how a part of unlearning gender essentialism is contending with there being no automatically safe category of people, and I've been generally kind of mulling over the way my past friendships have not worked out b/c of environmental factors but also stuff I can only describe by giving examples of it, like the whole "young queers are pushed into emotional intimacy and weakened boundaries b/c they're just that desperate for support" and the earlier "self-deprecating jokes and jokey suicidal ideation as a conversation starter". And even those things aren't.... comparable, I'm just so genuinely new to being able to verbalise my feelings that I've got a lot of comparisons to make to find out which ones of them stick x'D
I trend towards being a very literal person, and, like, I don't really get the nuances with something like this, but my point wasn't to be an alarmist about jokes like that except in the specific context of "me, and the few people like me who will make these same mistakes, don't really have a good intuitive sense to glean a positive message from this", because I know I've definitely read posts like it and went "oh that's talking about [something I did which I didn't realise was bad for me and my relationships], lol relatable"