Since the beginning of 2023, I’ve had some time to reflect on previous life experiences and where I’m heading. Likewise, I also found the time to reflect on who I am as a person and pinpoint a couple of things that I would like to change.
One of those aspects was explaining my choices to other people.
See, I live in a pretty conservative country, and no matter how confident or free you are, there will always be people making assumptions and even demanding answers. And when I think about it, I’m not entirely sure it’s country-specific. Humans, as a whole, enjoy poking their noses in other peoples’ business. That’s just the way society functions, I guess.
Anyway, back to the point.
I noticed that I tended to over-explain certain life choices or even personal characteristics, almost as if I was trying to excuse myself. Explaining why I studied the things I studied, hung out with the people I used to hang out with, dated the people I dated, experienced the conflicts I experienced, missed occasions because of health issues, pursued the hobbies I wanted to pursue, or even why I dyed my hair specific colours. The list kept going on and on.
Sure, all of this seems normal, right? Just people interacting, asking each other questions. Well, here’s the catch. To avoid other people constructing certain opinions about us, we will often explain and over explain things that are not necessarily anyone’s business. We all do it to some degree or another. Maybe we were even raised like that. But if you watch to take the next step in becoming a secure, self-sufficient individual, I suggest you stop. Just like I have.
Your choices are your choices. Your outlook on life is your’s, nobody else’s. Even your mistakes are your own mistakes and nobody else’s to judge and pick apart (aside from instances where you’ve genuinely harmed others).
This goes in tandem with the act of “oversharing”. We don’t overshare just because we want everyone to know everything about us, full stop. We want everyone to know everything about us, so if any information comes out, they would have heard from us first.
But again, we’re allowed to have secrets. We’re allowed to keep things to ourselves. Maybe our current social-media era of sharing personal information with the world and confessing things to an audience will have us thinking otherwise. Still, that notion does not reflect on the real world.
There’s a big difference between sharing information because you want to and sharing information because you feel like you have to. Sometimes, a little goes a long way. Learn how to say “no” without giving a whole speech as to why. Learn how to say that you did something just because you wanted to. Learn how to express that you like or dislike something or someone directly. I promise you, life gets so much easier.
