I’m an over-sharer. I just am. I’m very used to it - the sinking feeling when you look up from your ramble for a moment, only to find that slightly concerned look in your audience’s eyes - when the eyebrows raise after you’ve gorged all of your delicious, juicy juicy secrets, and you suddenly realise you’ve essentially bared your naked breasts to a room of strangers - but in the emotional way, not the stripper girl-boss way.
It’s part of why I love writing - especially for the stage. You do the over-sharing thing, but someone else gets up and does it for you (I am a lazy bastard after all). Plus, you get to hide all your secrets intermingled with other little bits, and no one quite knows whats true and what is beautiful beautiful fiction. AND instead of judgey looks, your over-sharing is met with applause, acclaim, praise and glory (or more often a limp cheer and a swift move towards the exit, but a rush nonetheless). Regardless, for an over-sharer like me, writing is freedom, and performance is therapy.
But more recently, my over-sharing has taken a turn. I used open
Microsoft Word to show off - to display to the world how insanely emotionally mature I am, to detail the exact pattern of thoughts that led to a perfectly clear and entirely boring revelation. I don’t know what changed, but quite honestly I think I got bored, and uncovered a whole new facet in writing that I suppose cleverer people had discovered long before; writing to understand, to process, beginning a piece not even knowing what it is about, let alone where it ends.
This kind of writing feels like uncharted territory. It’s exciting, but laced with that feeling of doom, a sinking feeling as you discover more about your characters, and then a millisecond later find a parallel discovery in yourself. But once you push through it - absolute freedom, and a sense of accomplishment that goes touch deeper. I’ve always said really wanky things like; “if this can touch just one person I’ll be proud”. And there’s something so deeply empowering in knowing you’ve done that. And in knowing that person is yourself.
This year, 2023, is going to be the year of writing scary things. I don’t mean gory horrors (although they are NOT off the table), but writing about things I don’t feel comfortable with - in fact finding things I feel entirely uncomfortable with. 2023 is going to be about the tricky, the sticky, the messy and the tangled. 2023 is going to be full of misses, and lots and lots of over-shares - but isn’t that where the magic happens?
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