The Cutprice Guignol

Hey, I’m Lou! Would you like to hear about my vagina? Or my self-harm? Or my sexuality? Or my anxiety disorder? Or depression? How about my vagina again? I’ve written about it all, in great detail, right here, for your browsing pleasure.

And sometimes, people ask me why. Obviously, aside from the question being a polite but heartfelt plea for me to please, please stop writing, nobody cares about your Riverdale opinions Lou, I get that writing about a lot of this stuff does come as kind of a shock to people, and I get that, entirely: this is stuff that’s really profoundly personal to me, and I put it online on the regular in grand detail.

But the truth is, I write about this stuff because it feels like an enormous weight off my shoulders. When I put something out there on this blog, I get that almost visceral feeling of having yanked those thoughts out of my own head and stuffed them into a blog post so they don’t have to stick around in my brain any longer. I worry a lot (what’s new?) about what people think of my constant, unabated oversharing – namely, that they might assume I’m doing it for the attention – but the truth is, it’s enormously helpful for me to be able to indiscriminately spray my emotions over the internet.

It’s odd, because I struggle a lot with being open and honest with the people in my life to whom I could actually be open and honest about these issues with, but doing it through this platform is safer, somehow. Even though more people can get their hands on it, I know at least that I’m not going to mess up the telling of it, or say the wrong thing, or come out with something that makes the situation seem appalling or incomprehensible.

Writing has always, always, always been my way of working through what’s going on in my head – I express myself through writing better than I ever could through words, as anyone who’s had to suffer through a conversation with me can attest to – and trying to give shape to my feelings here is the best way I’ve found to figure them out in the real world, too. And by the time I’ve written all that out, and honed it to a place where it makes sense to me, putting it out into the world helps exorcise it from my brain for good. Sometimes, I’ll go back and read my older posts about certain issues, either to see how my mind has changed or to take a look at a point in time where I could make sense of it all.

So, that’s me, oversharing on oversharing. I get that some people find it pretty weird, but I thought it would be worth explaining my rationale behind it all. And saying that, hey, if you’ve been nervous about putting personal stuff out there – do it. I honestly can’t think of a negative response I’ve had to my oversharing – all the worst trolls I get here are DC stans mad about my Man of Steel hate-on – and, even if nobody else reads it, at the very least you might help yourself make sense of what’s going on inside you’re own head. Or, you know, your own opinions on Doctor Who. Both equally important, as far as I’m concerned.

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