I was thinking the other day. Kind of dangerous, I know, but I was. There’s a lot going on right now in my life. I have situations stemming from roommates, school, work, life…all of that stuff rolls all together into one big stress-attack on my life. There are several ways I deal with stress. I play video games and kick the crap out of things for a while. I read books. I write things like short stories, articles, posts for rpgs, and, blog posts. I pray. I sing. I spend time with people. One of the main ways I deal with stress, however [and maybe one of the worst ways] is to talk to others about it.

There’s a lot of stuff inside of my head, and it’s all floating around in there like a big jumbled ocean of disaster. Seriously. One of the few ways I can make sense of all of it is to write. I write in a journal. I write in this blog. I write other things. Writing is easy, I can spill out whatever I want onto the page. I also pray. Praying is hard for me. I get distracted like whoa [which, of course, is sometimes satan's intention]. I often don’t know what to say. And, I’ve been brought up with the idea that complaining to God is a bad idea.

I was also brought up in a home where it wasn’t really beneficial to share problems that I was dealing with because there were much bigger problems in our home. There was a hard divorce, and because of that I became pretty sheltered inside of myself, especially in high school and my first year of college.

I look back at that time and don’t even recognize myself. I was fake when I came to college, and I don’t want to be fake when I leave. Its hard to imagine that at one time I was that person…hell, that I was that person even just two years ago. I want to be real, open, vulnerable. I want people to know me, to understand me. The problem is that I live in a culture that is more and more about removing the traditional relationship and replacing it with an electronic substitute. We chat online, blog, play online video games, and generally avoid reality as much as possible. [ask the 10,000,000 people who play World of Warcraft, for example].We take the personal and make it completely private. We’re raised to believe that we all have to deal with our own problems, and if you can’t deal with the problems on your own then there’s something wrong with you.

But, where’s the line between open, and oversharing? Where’s the line between vulnerable and pathetic? How much are we supposed to keep to ourselves, and how much are we supposed to share? The idea of being completely open with people and vulnerable with people like the Christian idea of accountability and fellowship seems to profess is stopped short at a certain point. At some predetermined point, we all know when we’ve ‘said too much’. It’s a cultural thing, I think. We are taught by our parents and friends while we grow up that there is a line, as well as the general area where that line is.

I don’t think that there’s a real problem with having some sort of imaginary cultural line to stop the outpouring of useless information. There is a certain point where the information stops being useful, and begins to descend into idle words that don’t really mean anything, but you spill them out anyway.

It becomes a problem when the line is set so that we don’t share anything personal. There have been so many times that I’ve kept serious problems to myself simply because of the idea that ‘no one’s going to care’ or ‘they don’t really need to know’ or even, ‘it’s my problem and i need to deal with it myself’. We end up suffering alone, when we don’t need to. It’s a trap designed to cause us to fall because we have no support.

I don’t really have some kind of ‘fix it’ plan for this, or even a beginning suggestion. I think everyone has been on one side or the other of the line, listening or speaking.

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