Member-only story
I’m Overthinking Oversharing
I can’t tell if I’m taking too much space and it’s driving me insane
I’ve always had this intrinsic fear of being too much. Too much of a burden, too much of a liability for friends and family.
Even in therapy I frequently apologized to my therapists for talking so much. That I’m putting them through so much horror, and that they probably don’t want to hear any of it. I have always been — and still am — convinced that I don’t deserve to be heard. When one of my therapists told me that he is getting paid to listen to me that frankly didn’t make it any better. I think it was his failed attempt at making me feel better, and he achieved quite the opposite. Voilà.
One time in music group therapy I played the piano with all my heart and all my soul. I poured decades of suffering into my play and it made a lot of people in the group cry. I thought that I was just playing the piano as any other normal person would but it must have been so powerfully and overwhelmingly destructive that many were bawling their eyes out, eventually including myself.
The moment I stopped playing I realized what I had done to my fellow human beings in the room, and it turned that therapy session into a nightmare for me. I felt so much guilt for having moved everybody to tears that I spent the rest of…
