I have a friend who is going through pain and heartbreak. She is hurting, and it’s natural that she should be, the circumstances are hard, she hurts, she is raw.
I saw her the other night and asked her how she was doing. She told me … she’s struggling, she didn’t know how she was going to get through the day. Then she apologised for ‘oversharing’.
Seriously, how bad is our culture that when someone says “how are you?”, we don’t really want to know the answer. How bad is our culture that we only want “fine”, or “good” as a reply. Why do we deliberately distance ourselves from each other? Why do we all play the game?
Maybe the causes of our disconnected lives aren’t Facebook, or the internet, or broken families, or anything else that is an easy thing to point the finger at. Maybe it is our inability to answer truthfully when someone asks how we are, and our reluctance to listen sincerely when someone replies with something other than “fine”.
My friend called it oversharing, I just call it sharing, and I believe that’s actually how life should be.
I think we’ve overscheduled ourselves to the point that we feel we are always too busy to just stop and LISTEN. Good post, J.