I once had a manager who told me I was a hard arse.

That made me cry.

In retrospect I probably was a bit of a hard arse. I expected a high standard of work from my team. I like working with people who are solutions focused.

I doubt that manager would have called me a hard arse if I was a guy. He was one of the few obviously sexist blokes I worked with and I didn’t feel bad at all when I resigned about six months later.

The evolution of social media has turned us into a population of oversharers. Wind the clock back 15 years and I had a handful of friends that I spoke to on the phone regularly and caught up with as often as we could manage.

Today I have 532 Facebook ‘friends’ plus more than double that in Instagram followers and four times that in Facebook page likers. That’s an awful lot of people I’m sharing my life with. Some of them would know more about me than any of those handful of friends would have back in the day.

There are 2000 plus (not counting the 600 on Twitter, 500+ on LinkedIn or contacts on my email database) people in my social networks.

That completely overwhelms me when I write those numbers down. Personality wise I’m an introvert and, by definition that means I need time to myself in order to recharge. Time away from the noise. Social media can be really noisy, kind of ironic given that my career path has taken me into the online world.

I’m also an introspective person, when I need to work through something I turn inward and to those closest to me. Of all of those people in my networks there are only a handful that I trust completely and without question. The people who I trust to ask for help when I need it, and they’re not always the same people.

Occasionally I feel the desire to share my crap with my few thousand BFFs online, sometimes I even write the post. Then I take a deep breath and reconsider whether it’s something that really needs to be shouted out loud.

I am naturally guarded about what I do and do not share online. I don’t share all my crap because I don’t think it’s interesting to anyone. My own crap bores me to tears when I’m having a tough time with it, there are so many more uplifting things to talk about with the general population.

I guard my own energy fiercely and don’t want to ask for input I’m not willing (or interested) in giving in return.

There’s this trend towards women wanting others to be ‘more real’ and not just ‘showing a highlight reel’. It’s a trend that I’m not comfortable with. I question, Carrie Bradshaw style…Do people they want to see more than a highlight reel, because hearing about the crap makes them secretly feel better about themselves?

Personally, I dislike being given sympathy. It feels icky and unnatural to me. It’s a behaviour that irritates me, it feels like judgement and doesn’t make me feel any better. That’s one big reason that I don’t share my crap.

As I’m writing this and working towards some conclusions I’m starting to second guess myself about whether this is something that’s okay to publish. Is it too extreme?

Maybe it’s that amidst all our talk of not judging other women we are judging them. Worse, we’re judging them more than ever before because everything is so much more open. Once you’ve said something it’s hard to escape from it. Phrase it the wrong way and things get messy really quickly.

Certainly there is a level of comfort in being able to read stories that we identify with. However I think that those stories of trial and triumph work best when they’re shared in their complete form. This leaves less for interpretation and better empowers the owner of the story.

When we expose our vulnerabilities we open ourselves up to potential harm. Surely we do ourselves honour through a show of strength, by sharing a more complete story.

When we share snapshots of extreme highs and lows I think that women dumb things down. I look around and see the women who have achieved the highest of heights and deepest respect, they don’t share their momentary crap.

They share their journey more retrospectively, in a way that others can draw on without jumping to conclusions. That’s what’s inspiring, women who share their strengths not their weaknesses. Women who have the conviction to stand up to the crap, find perspective and solutions and rise above it.

I feel that if I hope to inspire others with my stories then they need to illustrate a more complete and balanced picture. This way I’m vulnerable and relatable but I’m protecting myself and my integrity too.

Tatum xx