As many of my other articles on Her Campus Kenyon and elsewhere will attest, I love oversharing. I have for a while now. In high school, I made jokes openly about my depressive episodes. I wrote a senior thesis in part about my chronic pain. I talked to anyone who was interested about strict parenting, sexual harassment, and learned sex-negativity. Everything about me was open, vulnerable, public. Everything about me still is laid out for the world (and, now, a lot of the Internet) to see.
I don’t completely know how to navigate the line between interior and exterior life. I’m not sure anyone does. There are probably things that I shouldn’t share, or that I should shape more thoughtfully and patiently before I share them, or that I’ve messed up. Many of my thoughts exist on the web: not only my final conclusions but my processes of getting there, my messy middles, my “I’m still figuring this out.” I’ve already gotten into a few awkward situations with people I know because they decided to Google me and read what emerged, and I’m sure more lie ahead.
This past week, thinking about my patterns of oversharing and obvious emotionality, I decided to look back through my Internet archives and saved photos. I stumbled across the first picture I ever posted on Instagram, an angsty, black-and-white selfie that’s been long deleted. My mother had banned me from making any social media accounts, but I disobeyed her precisely because I wanted to make myself seen and known in the world, on whatever small scale I could. In this photograph, my face fills the entire screen, a visual depiction of my need for vulnerability; the caption reads, “Even the comatose, they don’t dance and tell,” a lyric from Lorde’s song “Team.”
My insistence on not telling seems ironic, particularly given the fact it’s a declaration: I’m telling the world that I’m not telling them everything. I’m screaming that there’s something I’m silent about, something I can’t say. But in trying to remember what it was actually like to post that photo, to be a thirteen-year-old who thought that photo captured her personality and aesthetic, I also remembered that I did, intimately, exactly, feel that confusion and angst and melodrama. I wanted to be as loud as I could and also wanted to never speak. I needed attention and also couldn’t handle it. That was real.
One of my frustrations then, and still now, was that there were very few models in the world of people feeling similarly frustrated, emotional, and messy. Where could I read the narratives of other people who were also in process of determining how they felt about the world and about themselves? There was young adult fiction, sure, but it felt diminutive, written by adults who no longer knew fully what teenagedom meant. There was Tumblr and similar communities like it, but those came with their own problems. I wanted to see other teenagers publicly making their way, publicly discussing that journey, and to know I wasn’t alone.
A few weekends ago, I and several friends drove into Columbus for Lorde’s local concert. When I was thirteen, posting angsty lyrics as my Instagram caption, Lorde was sixteen, and she had just released her first album, Pure Heroine, from which “Team” came. I still love every song from that album, and I still love Lorde immensely. At its center, it’s intimately teen: driving the city’s streets on new licenses, riding the bus, feeling out of place, lamenting the end of childhood but also desperately wanting to leave everything behind. Lorde’s songs made me feel like my experiences mattered, like it would all work out, like I wasn’t just potentiality heading towards being a good adult but good in myself, as a teenager, as a valid world force.
At her concert, years later, Lorde still made me feel that way. Now with Melodrama also under her belt, she and her songs cover an even wider range of emotions: singing while getting dressed for a party with friends, quiet nights spent in bed, crying alone when the world hurts, screaming on Middle Path because the world is beautiful. She embraces contradictions and nuances, she acknowledges that mutually exclusive emotions can somehow both be true and once, and she is full of grace while also graceless, intelligent and put-together but also clumsy and still on her way. Her success comes not despite her youth but because of it: her ups and downs, her vividness, and her emotional supersaturation are products of a young life, in which everything feels like the end of the world and the best thing ever. She feels too deeply, too much, and yet also not enough; she recognizes the pain of adolescent experiences but also the promise of having the entire world in front of you. There’s “glory and gore,” and there’s “the glamour, and the trauma, and the fucking melodrama” constantly, so much life that she doesn’t know what to do with it. Through her, I see myself. Through her, I feel not alone.
Of course, Lorde and her success rely on oversharing. “Ribs,” one of my favorite songs not only on Pure Heroine but in general, was written about Lorde’s first time using a fake ID, about secrets and deep emotions. I used to listen to it on repeat every time my high school best friend, Georgia, left my house after a sleepover, my sheets stained with chocolate Ben and Jerry’s, tissues on my nightstand from our late night crying sessions, mind turning over everything we’d said to each other at 3 am. In those moments, I wanted to stay forever in my teen life: to stay with Georgia, eyes wet from discussing our messy love lives and ribs tough from laughing over our jokes, antics, and future plans. But I wanted also to leave, to find one path, to not live in contradictions. I wanted everything and nothing, embrace and rejection.
So I overshare. I want what I write to provide for someone what Lorde’s music did for me, an anchor to turn to the morning after a sleepover, a party, a beginning and an ending. I want a place for chaos, confusion, and distinctly teenaged feelings. I want a place that I could have used and appreciated as a messy adolescent, and even now as a messy college student. The world needs more of these places and people. Talking not just about the prettiness of our lives, but about everything, and making space for everything in all facets of life, forms connections and aids us in becoming better. I would rather be openly emotional and awkward than the alternative of always hiding, never growing or pushing others to feel validated and also grow. I want to never turn comatose, nor implicitly aid other people in numbing themselves, in shutting down their emotions; I want to dance and tell. I want to talk about everything.