Not Everything That Matters Is Meant to Be Shared

There was a time when I shared everything.

Not in the oversharing-on-social-media sense, though I did that too. In the deeper sense. The sense where I believed that connection required full transparency. That if someone asked how I was doing, they deserved the real answer. That holding anything back was a form of dishonesty. That being open was the same as being strong.

I carried this belief through friendships, through my marriage, through my career. I told people what I was going through because I thought that is what brave women did. I let people into my process while it was still happening, raw, unresolved, half-formed. I treated my own evolution like a communal experience, something that belonged to everyone who cared about me.

And for a long time, this felt virtuous.

Until it did not.

The shift happened during my divorce. Not because anyone did anything wrong (although some people did) but because for the first time I was going through something so seismic and so personal that sharing it in real time felt like giving away pieces of myself I could not afford to lose.

I was co-parenting. I was processing grief. I was physically changing in ways I could not control. I was trying to figure out who I was outside of the identity I had built inside a marriage, a company, a life that no longer existed. And every time someone asked me how I was doing (with genuine care, with good intentions) I felt the pull to perform my healing for them. To package my process into something digestible. To make my mess make sense to someone else before it made sense to me.