Torn between talking and shutting up: a field guide to oversharing
(Written pre-pandemic, polished during.)
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One had to discount, he thought, exaggerated speeches that concealed commonplace affections; as if the fullness of the soul did not sometimes overflow in the emptiest of metaphors, since none of us can ever express the exact measure of our needs, or our ideas, or our sorrows, and human speech is like a cracked kettle in which we beat out tunes for bears to dance to, when we long to inspire pity in the stars.
Gustave Flaubert, Madame Bovary
When I was a child, I had a book with a story in it about a king, who was so frightened of getting his feet dirty that he ordered for his entire kingdom to be wrapped in leather. Crops failed, animals died and people starved so he could walk where he pleased, with clean feet, free of fear. One day an old man stopped the king and quietly suggested that he might instead cut two, foot-sized pieces out of the enormous sheet.[1]
When someone asks me how I am, I feel an accounting being demanded. Behind my need to make sure the account I give is not false, another presses urgently in: to provide context, to explain history, to tell everything. All of it. Words spill from me in reliable floods, lack of control rooted in deep longing for it; the adamant, vain belief that with enough words I can push through, that information, enough of it, might be equal to truth.
To hold any part of my account back requires a faith – in language, meaning, other people – I do not have. I am unable, unwilling, to cut myself conversational shoes.
So I swerve, last-minute, around the dangerous gaps that loom in any story, unspooling a vast cartography of facts and emotions before my interviewer that I hope will leave them no space to misinterpret, judge. As the other person politely attempts to make room for this unwieldy, unfurling map on the conversational table, I feel my own words neatly divide me: a calm self, betrayed by a flushed, faithless emissary.
How am I?
Irritated, mainly by my boyfriend – but for this not to be misconstrued, the person also ought to know about the last fight I had with him: what caused it, why my fragility on that that day was not his fault; the person ought to know about other things unfolding with a friend far away, the fact that she was not always far away so this ought not to be taken as her defining character in this story or anywhere else; the person ought to know about other, nicer things my boyfriend has also done, that make my irritation towards him unfair and therefore more irritating to us both, but mainly, actually, to me.
I become afraid. That through inadequate articulation or by selecting my information badly, I will obscure and warp the truth about myself, and about the people I love. I over-articulate and provide all the information I possibly can. Which is to say, obviously, too much.
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The “neurotic character of language”, as coined by Norman Brown,[2] is a 20th century legacy:[3] language as faltering Morse code rather than truthful description, as “protective fiction” rather than fixed star. One instinctively, and accordingly, characterises over-sharers (those people who use too much language, those people who proffer too much information) as more-than-usually neurotic.
Yes: the over-sharer offers too much language – and, secretly unconvinced of its fidelity, leans on it still more heavily to force the issue re. clarity and accurate comprehension (both of which, like anything forced, slip promptly and inexorably further from reach). The over-sharer, battling the vertigo of other person’s subjectivity, understands everything may be important and so is unsure how far to extend the perimeter of their account of themselves.
The fact is no truly accurate account can be provided: the only map that leaves nothing out is a map the same size as the world.[4]
Simple, deadly questions like How are you or What’s wrong leave the over-sharer, the talkative person, the person who wishes to say something true and therefore perhaps be known, overwhelmed by where to begin or end their report. Talkative people are, in the[5] words of Simone Weil, “lacerated in our sense of time”.[6]
Speaking, falling so short of communicating, becomes an act of self-betrayal.
“I have said too much,” the talkative person says, treading water, weighed down by the billowing clothes of their own words. “I intended to keep quiet and yet I didn’t. I shared too much. I was incontinent.” Shame sheers away from hurt and as it is wont to do, toward irritation at and blame of the other person: “They were miserly. They demanded my account and then did not sign it off. They gave nothing and so I am exposed. They chose to leave me exposed. They exposed me.”
A banishment is not less lonely because it is self-imposed.
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“As the prestige of language falls, that of silence rises,” Susan Sontag writes.[7]
Where once speaking felt like honesty, like relief, silence begins to feel like truth, like safety. Reticence signifies self-control, dignity, consideration for other people. Silence as patience, health, silence as an act of love.
After Christmas I stayed at the house of a family friend, a psychoanalyst. I listened over lunch as she recounted a story stretching back decades. I was utterly spent, seasonal ledger notched with train rides, relatives, constant drinking and inconstant sleep; too tired to be harried by a habitual disquiet driving me to prompt, affirm, relate. I listened, that afternoon. I couldn’t master myself to do otherwise. Later, she told me she had appreciated a stoic quality in my attention. Unlike others, she said, I had not been afraid to let her speak – to stay quiet. I wondered how much effort I had been going to, before this, to do exactly the wrong thing.
Silence, Sontag writes, “keeps things open”:
“Unmoored from the body, speech deteriorates. It becomes false, inane, ignoble, weightless. Silence can inhibit or counteract this tendency, providing a kind of ballast, monitoring and even correcting language when it becomes inauthentic.”
Art, she adds, gives one space: enough “to talk oneself [back] into silence”.
Javier Marías has one novel’s[8] narrator observe: “To fall silent, yes, silent, is the great ambition that no one achieves not even after death.”
This narrator has recently separated from his wife.
“Of both of us,” he reflects, “they will say: why all that conflict and struggle, why did they fight instead of just looking and staying still?”
I read this with a curious kind of pain. I fight instead of looking or staying still. Rummage around even though I might break things that are important to me. Because though I am told to hold my nerve, guard a private self, share less, keep my own counsel, I wish only – and more than anything – to speak.
And the problem with staying still – especially during a fight, I have found – is that I may at last take up silence for noble reasons: for poise, a cloak of dignity to share between parties. But ineluctably, I am soon wielding it as a means of power.
I am too aware of the cutting way I am unnerved by the silence of others for my own to ever be neutral. The sort of composure won by containing one’s self in the face of the other person’s unease is unpleasant to me. Silence, as Sontag points out, is also speech – commonly of complaint or indictment. Silence as act of war.
Rachel Cusk encounters this disturbing opacity in her husband (or her reading of him):[9]
“He was often silent,” she writes,
“and sometimes I found the silences unnerving. They caused me to feel panic: I feared it meant the story was faltering, breaking down; I feared it giving way beneath me.”
This is the difficult altitude at which the talkative person usually talks, to break the seal of silence: partly from a wish not to oppress, partly to equalise the pressure in their own ears – to banish the deep fright that to talk to another person, really talk, is not possible.
Once in a confused moment, looking through my boyfriend’s phone, I saw a poem he had written in his notes. We wove a braid of sense, it said, always came back to one another to find our way through the marshes, to find out what each of us meant to say.
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A principle that presents itself persistently in the case against silence: that it is generous, and therefore probably important, to share.
Cusk registers this impulse, noting her “need to offer explanations” to guests who visit her new home while she’s renovating:
“I would describe what was going to be done to it and what it would look like, as though creating a home out of mere words, and watch their faces brighten as the vision transferred itself from my head to theirs.”
What she registers, as well as her own compulsion, is their appreciation, is pleasure.
The offering of detail and context, the giving of too much that is personal, can transform perfectly quotidian information, a purely mundane account, into something vital and interesting to the person listening. Lots of language is exciting. Over-sharing feels much more gleaming and fun.
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A male friend once suggested to me that women share as a form of social currency. He said he thought the sharing of a confidence was an exercise that women undertake to ensure mutual vulnerability (a secret can never be unheard); a clever manipulation – consciously or not, a deployment of soft power.
Such an appraisal ties a confidence inextricably to its (threatened, inevitable) violation. Reserve and silence are the only way for Marías’ narrator, newly alone, to avoid “profiting from the knowledge obtained through another’s weakness or carelessness or generosity”. He says:
“No, I should not tell or hear anything, because I will never be able to prevent it from being repeated or used against me, to ruin me or – worse still – from being repeated and used against those I love, to condemn them.”
Even as I scorn this idea it unsettles me.
To share is to welcome in, to introduce, to light the way to one’s own best parts – I want it to be so; for it to be that to confide is to examine, conspire, to seek solace or give it. “I am open!” I have crowed, proud of wearing my own map so lightly, gallant in my freedom to share the shifting facts of my own life. Except my friend’s cynicism, so tricky to distinguish from ingenuous observation, scalds me, makes me wary of my own modes. Weakness or carelessness or generosity.
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A confidence, one must admit, is rarely if ever one’s own. An affair, for instance, involves another person; an opinion, the subject’s standing in the eyes of their listener. A new job, a diagnosis, a change of heart always includes various parties who may wish to know or not to know. What have we the right to share at all? What is to be gained when meaning may be so precarious?
“An ear alone is not a being,” writes John Cage.[10] He proposes that music – the composition as it is composed – is an “ideal[ised] situation”, presupposing as it does its own immaculate transference to a impartial receptor. The composition assumes, he points out, only the fact of the receiving ear, blithely disallowing the fact that coughs, doors closing, phones buzzing, will profoundly alter the hearing of it. Perhaps a fire alarm will go off and halt transmission altogether. Even if not, the listener is sure to filter out what they believe to be extraneous among all these noises, focus more closely in moments they sense to be familiar, tune out if they get bored having made their own assumptions about what “the piece” will do next. Each listener, this is to say, will ultimately hear the composition as entirely different utterances.
One cannot account for the context of their audience, the extraneous stressors, their hidden tripwires.
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Even the most basic declaration, of one’s own feelings, cannot be reliably transcribed to another listener.
The talkative person, the over-sharer, understands this only, with true dismay, mid-confidence. The weight of the untranslatable is then tacked onto a daunting list: unreliability of language; impatience (or at best limited time) of the listener; impossibility of adequate and comprehensive context. Most of all, alarm, that one cannot follow one’s speech out into the world to guard it valiantly from future misinterpretation. It is now, as Sontag says, unmoored from us. All this, even before the most eager of listeners or beloved of friends. Far more consternation, then, on the heels of the confession offered unasked, perhaps after too much wine, to a party whose motivations remain opaque. The over-sharer is troubled by a sense they know simultaneously to be absurd: that their confidences have been somehow wrangled from them in exchange for nothing. Swinging out on the trapeze of language, they have not been caught but left hanging, in peril, misread.
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Two paths to avoid being misread, both treacherous:
One is to think out loud, to speak to make sense of a thing. This necessitates constant disclaimers: “not necessarily my final position”; “for the sake of argument”; “an extreme example”. The problem: these provisos are distracting, annoying in the lack of faith they reveal in the listener (“just tell me the story!”). The talkative person talks to dispel doubt, to assuage it, but in fact creates more, appearing duplicitous and unsure.[11]
The second is to maintain silence until a position (or at least coherently articulated lack of such) has been established; to only speak when it is possible to speak thoughtfully, and in so doing, minimise bugs in the transmission of meaning. The problem: everything is in flux; a position/lack thereof can never be finally established. The possibility of perfect language is debilitating. But silence is communication too, we know, subject to be construed, or more to the point misconstrued, by one’s listener. So when are we to speak? How do we communicate truth, and who are we if we choose to remain silent because it cannot be communicated? Who is the over-sharer when they don’t; the talkative person when they give up on speech?
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“Strictly speaking, nothing that’s said is true. (Though a person can be the truth, one can’t ever say it)”: Sontag.
“To be a person, then, is to possess a mask”: Sontag, a year later.[12]
One is returned, always, to the inadequacy of language – and, surprisingly often, to the botched shorthand of the mask, which savagely enforces misreading even as it attempts to be better understood.
The mask of the talkative person is the commonplace, the verbal tic, continually exacerbated and reconstituted by the internet and texting and all reading the same articles. Convenient speech entraps us: accessible motifs, talismans – personal or communal – to protect us from being misunderstood. We neglect to keep notating the full complexities folded into the daytime chatter, until the day find we ourselves reaching for tangible ways to express our substance, our hurts and hopes, and pull forth only hollowed phrases even the internet long ago acknowledged to be emptied out. To feel oneself without language is frightful, and frightening.
Conversation collapses in the frantic babble of the fight, in which one wilfully ceases speaking to communicate, and simply talks, as loudly as possible: for protection, to silence the other person. Even, or especially, to hurt them and so perhaps just for a moment to survive. “An argument is only an emergency of self-definition, after all,” Cusk writes. She recalls a scene:
“Make her stop!’ my daughters used to beg me when they were younger and one was doing something the other didn’t like. In other words: restore me to the primacy of my version; rid me of this challenge to the experience of being me.”
One person or the other in an argument will go too far; one person or the other give up in disgust. The pendulum swings back to silence. Silence as defence, as despair that we can ever say what we need without becoming trapped in the cement of old words. But there is no safety net to be found there. Silence is not a burrow; it is an abyss.
So then, in that case, what?
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My buzzes with a text from my mother as I am writing this: a lengthy deus ex machina.
My mother: writer of long letters filled with of sprawling stories and generous confidences, atlas of personal cartography spanning hundreds of volumes, unabashed galaxy of words. The sharing Demeter to my confused Persephone. For 30 years as I have fled the discomfort of communicating, back to underworld, silence, rest, cold, she has been the year-long summer: waiting as I have tumbled back, again and always, to words.
“Words both report and invent. Chattering new territory. They can civilise us,” she texts me. “They don’t cement life and love they liberate it. Or rather they can”
She texts again with a stream of corrections, among which is: “That was charting not chattering but chattering will do.”
Yes, perhaps it will.
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[1] See also: Spoon is cheaper than change the whole fence. See also: shoes
[2] Life Against Death: The Psychoanalytical Meaning of History, 1959
[3] See also: Wittgenstein, Freud, Derrida
[4] See also: Borges, whose fictional guild of obsessive cartographers winds up with “a Map of the Empire whose size was that of the Empire” – not unlike the King.
[5] (translated)
[6] Gravity and Grace, 1952
[7] The Aesthetics of Silence, 1966
[8] Your Face Tomorrow Volume 1: Fever and Spear, 2002: a pointedly verbose book about the treachery of words
[9] Coventry, 2019
[10] Silence, 1973
[11] “Muddy water is best cleared by leaving it alone,” Alan Watts tells me smugly via Facebook productivity widget.
[12] apropos of Bergman’s Persona, a film about fragmentation, about our irremovable masks).