I Have a History of Oversharing Online

When I was in high school, I had a website where I chronicled my life. From the most mundane details of what I ate for breakfast to what song was playing as I typed up my entry, I felt compelled to share it with the world. I don’t think it even really mattered if anyone was reading it. I just genuinely wanted to share my words.

I met a lot of friends online and we started creating things together. For a few years, I worked on a zine called Binibini, which was started by Yashmine. Hers was the very first website I followed and checked constantly. Every month, we would ask Filipinas like us to write and make art focused on a central theme. I’m sure if you search hard enough, you’ll find some version of it archived on the Wayback Machine. I don’t even remember the things I wrote for it, but I’m sure they were very personal.

These days, you’ll be hard-pressed to find any writing that resembles the things I used to publish on my personal website (or, gasp, my friends-only Livejournal). I don’t know when I stopped oversharing. Maybe when Facebook and Instagram took over the WWW and it seemed like people would judge you if you did? Or maybe it’s when my real-life friends finally joined me online and it wasn’t so strange to be connected all the time anymore.

But for the past few months, I’ve been exchanging messages with my friends Chinggay and Patty, ranging from John Mayer’s Instagram stories to the latest podcast about To All the Boys I’ve Loved Before‘s Noah Centineo. We’ve been working on this newsletter for IDK-how-long anymore. Last night, .

We wrote it so long ago that we couldn’t even remember what we wrote about. It was Chinggay who first sent hers back in June that made me write mine. Then Patty sent in hers and I said, who knew John Mayer would be key to all this oversharing? Honestly, we don’t know where we’re going with this, but we’re happy that we’re creating something together. We’re just letting you listen in on our conversation. (;