13 Challenges Of Being The Only Private Person In A Family Of Oversharers

1. You’ve come across movie scenes where the protagonist sits with their parents or siblings and just lays out their personal problems, and you can’t help but think “mmm that sounds fake but ok.”

2. Because you know if you were gonna tell your older brother about your recent almost-boyfriend, your 80-year old grandmother who lives 3,000 miles away was going to get an email about it within 2-3 business days.

3. To the Normal Person, maybe that isn’t so bad that your extended family is in the loop. But to you? No, you’re a Private Person, and the only thing more stressful about strangers or friends knowing intimate and personal information about you is your entire family knowing personal information about you.

4. Why is that worse? Because your family always wants to talk about it.

5. Your family could range from close-knit and small to a traditional Irish Catholic family of 200—it didn’t matter. Oversharing families have no boundaries when it comes to talking about each other and themselves, and it’s your worst nightmare.

6. Just like how you can’t believe how much they divulge about themselves so openly to one another, they can’t believe why you don’t too.

7. It’s also a double-edged sword because you also really don’t want to know details about your other family members’ personal lives. But, alas, you find yourself in the car with your mom, cringing as she tells you about how messy your sister’s breakup actually was.

8. Because if she’s telling you this, what is she telling your sister about you?

9. That’s why you mainly stick to the same safe and generic conversation topics with family members: grades, appropriate friends, and the last book you read.

10. You know how to tell them just enough, but not too much. You’re just innately very uncomfortable opening up to anyone, and you know these people have some kind of perpetual email chain going on with the subject line: Family Secrets/Embarrassing Stories.

11. Family reunions are stressful. You don’t know who knows what about you, and sometimes you find yourself cornered by your dad’s second cousin who you haven’t seen since you were five, and he’s asking you if the boy who dropped you off at home on December 14th, 2010 was your boyfriend like your parents suspected. You wish you could melt into the floor.

12. Every meal turns into a roundtable of each family member respectively spending 45 minutes talking about themselves before they turn to you and ask the five words every Private Person hates to hear: “So, what’s up with you?”

13. Anytime you accidentally slip up and someone in your family finds out something that’s a little too personal for your comfort level about yourself, you know everyone is going to latch onto it and it’s only a matter of time before you’re contacted by another family member about the details.