When being yourself makes you cringe

Overshare, open up, cringe, and apologize. Rinse and repeat. Turns out, there's a phrase for that and it's called the vulnerability hangover.

By the time you read this, I'll probably be hiding from the Internet in an anxiety spiral about whether I said too much, too little, or made a complete fool of myself. After all, I've done all three before so there's nothing stopping me from doing it again. I suppose I might hit the right balance between all three but try telling that to my 3 am inner critic.

Thanks to social media (Instagram, specifically), I now know that there's a term for that feeling of omg-what-have-I-done that I have felt my entire life after sharing anything personal and imperfect with anyone other than a few close people: a vulnerability hangover (best I can tell this originated with Brené Brown). In short, it's that cringey feeling you get after revealing parts of yourself that you try to keep to yourself, such as your regrets, secrets, or strong emotions. The things that you share with others that can leave you anxious and sick to your stomach the next day but subside in time. Unlike the feelings of shame and regret that come when you really do make a mistake or cross a line, this has more to do with freaking out simply because you opened up about yourself.

As a chronic over-sharer who also spent several years in the public eye, this is a feeling I know well. I’d like to say it got better with time, that I’m simply out of practice, but that would be a lie. I can’t even begin to count the number of nights I lost sleep agonizing about sharing too much about myself. But those sleepless nights usually weren’t from the public debates, the controversial votes, or the comments from the general public. Those were par for the course and while difficult, were mostly manageable (there were exceptions, of course).

No, the sleepless nights were (and still are) inspired by the benign. The tiny admissions that didn’t quite line up with who people thought I was, even if who they thought I was was wrong. The feeling that by sharing my struggles, I was diminishing theirs or burdening them with my problems. Questioning whether my reaction to something was justified or if I overdid it, again. It is not uncommon for me to apologize to the friends who fall between acquaintances and those I've known for decades for getting too worked up about a policy issue I care about or unloading my frustrations when life gets hard. They remind me that that's what friends are for and while I know this on an intellectual level, I feel compelled to apologize for being too..... me.

Now I can see that so much of the self-doubt is tied up in big feelings: anger, joy, confidence, passion.... the very same feelings that women in our society are taught to keep in check lest they be labelled hysterical or boastful. This is surely not a coincidence. To be a woman who both knows what she's passionate about and has the audacity to do something with it is seen as an open invitation for criticism, so the cruelty of vulnerability hangovers are almost a given.

Which really begs the question of why I’m writing this in the first place? By sharing that I experience the vulnerability hangover, aren’t I admitting something personal and imperfect? The answer is obviously yes, but like I said, I’m an over-sharer so I’m going to do it anyway. People are going to assume what they will of you in any situation so you may as well be yourself. But maybe, just maybe, putting a name to it will help it pass a little bit faster and a little bit more easily.