How Much Is Too Much?

One of the strange and amazing things about facebook is its ability to put you in contact with people you haven't seen or heard from for years... you know, old school mates, relatives you're a bit crap at keeping in touch with because you leave it to your mother to send the Christmas cards, etc...

On the whole, its been pretty good finding out what happened to these people from my childhood. Obviously, most of them are married with kids, although there are a few who, like me, have chosen a less traditional route and remain single, roaming the globe and focussing on their careers. So its quite varied, which is nice. And some of these people have achieved amazing things and have some quite inspirational stories to share.

But one old school friend has gone beyond what I think is the boundary of public sharing and I'm not sure how I feel about it. This friend (whom I actually haven't seen since we were about 13 given we went to different high schools and never kept in touch), recently posted a note on facebook entitled "Know Me", which was basically a history of her life. This note was quite explicit, giving all the intimate details of her relationships with her family and partners and detailing events and traumas which have happened to her over the years. And we're talking major traumas - rape, bashing, cults, etc etc. Heavy stuff.

I'm sure she had her own reasons for writing it and maybe it was cathartic for her to publicly air her skeletons and share it all with the world. But is facebook really the appropriate forum for this kind of information?

I guess there are a lot of things that I have vented about on this blog over the years, but then there aren't that many people who read it and even fewer who actually know the real me (so to speak). And those that do probably know most things about me anyway. But I don't think that I would be so explicit with details on facebook. Not that I've suffered even 1/100th of the things she's been through.

And that brings me to another thing which bothered me about her post. In it, she details a history of violent and abusive relationships with men... she's been married a couple of times and one partner deliberately caused her to suffer a miscarriage (the details of that are too disturbing to post here). Now all that information was a little too much for starters, but secondary to that I began to wonder what is it about this woman, that all these terrible things have happened to her over the course of 38 years?

I'm not saying she's brought it on herself but I do think that what we put out into the world comes back to us... our beliefs and ideas about ourselves are often the cause of our emotional and physical problems and feed into the kind of choices we make in relationships.

Anyway, it got me thinking. Which maybe she intended, maybe not.

It really does all boil down to choice doesn't it? I've made some not-so-great choices in my life but on the whole I think I've done ok. And (touch wood) I've never experienced horrors like this woman has. Luck or the power of positivity?

Something to ponder as the new year approaches.