Resisting the urge to overshare

I, like many my age who were teenagers when social media really started taking off, had no sense of boundaries when I first started posting from my personal accounts online.

It wasn't quite as taboo to overshare about your life then as it is now. Facebook, for example, created this illusion of privacy -- if only your friends could see your posts, then everything was sacred. Which is a ridiculous thing to believe now. But it was like 2007, okay? We knew so little.

Thankfully, I didn't have Twitter until I was in college (not that I needed one). I was close enough to considering my future career prospects to know that tweets were public, and because I used my (mostly) real name for professional development reasons, I also had enough sense not to post too much about my personal life online.

I'm not sure when exactly it finally clicked for me that posting about myself often involved sharing private things about other people too -- my romantic partner, my friends, my family members, people I worked with. No one ever consented to me posting about situations that involved them, even if I never mentioned them directly. Maybe my frontal lobe finally finished developing. Maybe I stopped thinking only about myself long enough to realize other people mattered too.

As content creators, we want to share our lives with our audiences. It's part of the appeal on both sides. But you have to figure out what your boundaries are and, once you lock them down, establish the lines you will never cross and adhere to them. I, for example, will sometimes share humorous anecdotes about me and my partner, but sparingly and without much detail. I do not mention my family. My kids, if I ever have them, are already off-limits in every aspect aside from publicly acknowledging that they exist.

Everyone's oversharing boundaries are different, but the sooner you know what yours are, the more rewarding your online experience will be.