Oversharing

Happy New Year, everyone! I’m pleased to tell you that the daily blog is going to continue this year as well. If last year’s goal was to ensure that I’m writing on a daily basis and posting something or the other on this forum, this year’s goal is a little more specific. I’d really like to be writing topical blog posts on the daily. Its these kind of posts which give me the most joy, and I really don’t like blogging if I’m lazily posting media I find interesting on the blog. I have the newsletter for that.

One of my friends told me a story about music today. I’ve been getting back into the academic study of music off-late, and we were discussing an experience she had at University, as well as an uncanny relationship between mathematics and music. That tale, naturally, took me down a rabbit-hole on the internet – reading about the various ways in which mathematical modeling is useful in music analysis. This is news to me, but also doesn’t surprise me too much. With the existence of digital audio workstations and electronic music programming being available, and digital electronics generally becoming involved in music production – it’s essential that mathematics is used in some way: for certainty and precision in tone, for example, or in pitch. The extent of that integration, though, is something that I didn’t think through entirely. There’s so much material about it out there, and is, by far, the best way I could have hoped to start my 2020. 

However, she caveated the tale by apologizing for oversharing. That got me thinking about several things, the first of which was, Why? The second of which was more along the lines of whether I ought to apologize for oversharing on this blog. However, if you’re reading the blog, I safely presume you are, at the very least, interested in my commentary on mundane things in my life, and thus, are reading the blog – which led me to dismiss the notion of being apologetic. Then I thought about it some more. What is oversharing? Who defines what crosses the limit of sharing information about oneself? Why must there be a limit to what we share? And what role does self-censorship play in all of this?

I don’t have answers to any of these questions, and I shut down all of these thoughts by choosing, quite actively not to think about it as much for the rest of the day – atleast not till I began writing this post. And I do, now, have some thoughts about oversharing. 

For me, I think living in a hostel at a residential University has taken away the confined boundaries within which I imagined sharing of information and conversation ought to take place. The concept of giving away “too much information” disappeared out the window when in the second semester we grew close enough and comfortable enough to discuss unhappy sightings in the boys hostel washroom over lunch or dinner at our meal tables. Oversharing to me is the art of narrating a perfect story, with emotion, detail that isn’t essential to the barebones of the structure of a tale, but make it unique enough that I can relate and feel all the things you felt when you tell me about the story. It’s the art of meandering conversation – as all conversations are, and of endless conversation, as only some conversations can be. So, oversharing, in all its glory, especially with me – is welcome. Especially given how much I enjoy conversation that carries on through without goodbyes or endings.

Some chatboxes will remain permanently open, for messages keep shuffling in and out. It’s those chatboxes in which oversharing takes place in all its glory, and those chatboxes I cherish most. 

Especially when I’m running out of material to blog about but the year has only begun.