Don't Share it All

// The Things I Haven't Shared Yet

It’s a strange thing - the feeling that you need to be constantly sharing your life in public. You obviously start with good intentions - to document, to reflect, to be more vulnerable and let people into your life to feel more connected with you but after a few years, you start to notice the trade-offs.

The more you give away, the less you’re sure what’s just yours anymore - it's a weird feeling when people know most of what goes on in your life because you share a lot of what's 'personal' to you online.

I’ve written hundreds of posts now - all about burnout, creativity, mistakes, my marriage, fear, pride, and even AI - and I try to write each one as honest as I can - I don't try to hold anything back but there’s a quiet part of me that sometimes wonders - what would happen if I didn’t share it all?

Do people actually care about what I have to say?

Would the story still count if nobody read it?

There is always a part of me that thinks I go too far in what I share - I recently had a client say that they 'love my honesty' but I think that's just who I am - honest and open.

// The Letter Idea

As we approach the end of the year, I was scrolling through old drafts and ideas to finish off the last three blogs of the year and I was looking through the ones that never made it to your inbox - those ideas that I've started but they never quite met the standard - some were half-finished, some rambling, some too raw to hit publish.

I was reading them back and I realised I didn’t abandon them because they were bad - I abandoned them because they were mine. They felt too personal to post - they were my own lessons that I wrote about and they were all mine, they weren't meant for anyone else but for my own sanity.

They weren’t ready to be turned into lessons or metaphors - they were just moments — unpolished, unresolved, still being worked through in my head and maybe they were never meant to be content in the first place.

The blog I write is my own personal vessel to express myself and sometimes, I cross the line into sharing too much.

I don't think everything is worth sharing - some things I write are too personal but it does help to write them down

Some stories work better when they’re whispered to yourself and some lessons don’t need an audience to matter to you - you can tell them to yourself with no fear of judgement.

They're like that 'angry letter' that you're supposed to write before you speak to someone - my mum always used to say to me that I should write a letter before having an angry conversation because of two things - firstly, the art of writing a letter takes time and usually, you'd have calmed down by then and secondly, you get your thoughts out and onto paper - again, you'd usually calm down.

// The Shift

I’ve built a rhythm around openness - it’s how I process, how I connect with others and how I operate in my life but there’s a line between being transparent and being emptied of everything that you hold close.

Sometimes I cross it without noticing - I tread into my personal too much.

It’s a strange, almost invisible shift - the one that comes from turning every emotion into a narrative (life is full of stories and everything interconnects) but you can start living your life with a narrator in your head, commentating on every moment - every conversation becomes a paragraph and every mistake becomes “content”

You don't want to get to that place.

Suddenly you'll have the realisation that the thing that once helped you feel more alive by sharing quiet intimate moments to yourself is now treading on your thoughts as you don't have the space to work through them alone - some things are personal, some things need to be kept to yourself so that you can have the space to work through them by yourself and that's ok.

Lately, I’ve been practising restraint, pulling back from writing things and not posting them because they felt too personal.

I'm not sure if I've mentioned this to you before but I like the feeling of letting ideas sit for a few days - or weeks - until they stop demanding an audience.

Some of the ideas fade, some get deep and some get worked out in public - all of them are my own thoughts which is a whole other conversation around authenticity and AI but I'm not going there in this blog.

Either way, they teach me that silence can be just as creative as expression - because you're maintaining that thread of a thought and allowing it to be worked out - you're returning to it and giving yourself permission to work through an idea.

That's what sharing gives you - space.

// The Reminder

I think this week's blog is just a reminder to myself and to you that not everything has to become content - you (and I) don't need to share everything to appear vulnerable or human - not every story needs to turn into a 'here's what I learned' post on Linkedin - sometimes people don't appreciate them.

You can just live quietly - the thoughts can live as a note on your phone, a line in your head, a photo that never leaves the camera roll - it can be a small, private piece of work that reminds you that the work doesn’t have to be grand or on stage to be real - your space is yours.

I think what I'm saying is that the best ideas often start in the dark - the half-formed sentences, the 'working out' that you never finish, the scenes you replay quietly until you understand them but sometimes you don't need to share them for them to be valuable to you.

They’re not wasted - because they can become compost - they allow other ideas to grow and they make the next thing possible.

// The Final Thought

Maybe the point isn’t to stop sharing, maybe it’s to learn when to hold something back and keep it to yourself.

To know the difference between expression and exposure.

Because there’s a cost to putting everything out there - even the good stuff, every time you share a thought, you give a little piece of it away, and sometimes what you really need is to sit with it until it becomes something that has weight.

I think there’s a version of me that used to see silence as avoidance, like if I wasn’t sharing I was hiding what my thoughts were and I don’t feel that way anymore.

Silence feels deliberate now - a kind of trust that not every feeling needs witnesses to have a kind of validation - you can keep a story, or a sentence, or a photograph to yourself and it still counts.

Maybe it even counts more.

I think we don’t always need to perform the process of 'becoming' - we just need to live it - that's what life is for.

Some stories need air and applause because they're achievements whilst others just need time and distance and maybe those are the ones we never post - the fragments, the rough notes, the things still unfolding - those are the pieces that remind us who we are when nobody’s watching.

And sometimes the only way to be ourselves is to keep a few things quietly, deliberately, just yours.