on being filterless
there's power in being a blabbermouth
There’s not much I’m unwilling to share with people. Within moments of meeting me, it’s highly likely I could drop any rogue piece of information: the time I had sex with a 32-year-old virgin; what it was like having my IUD inserted by a gynaecologist instead of a GP; the milligram dose of antidepressant I’m on. Unprompted, I will divulge information some people would rather die than admit.
Speaking so freely and without self-consciousness would have once been an appalling concept to me. At fourteen-years-old, I was riddled with social anxiety and unable to last 15-minutes at a co-ed disco without having a panic attack. Conversation seemed impossible; there seemed to be categorically right and wrong things to say. Right: to mention how many standard drinks you secretly drank beforehand. Wrong: mentioning your love of One Direction. If these were the parameters for correct conversation, I was wholly unequipped to be talking to anyone other than myself.
However, as I’ve gotten older—and socialised more—I realise it isn’t so much that there is a right and wrong to how conversations work, but a will and a won’t.
I will tell you about the house I just bought. I won’t tell you how much it cost me.
I will tell you I just graduated from my degree. I won’t tell you that I don’t feel any sense of accomplishment.
People are not, as a standard, partial to total transparency. Whether we are conscious of it or not, there are certain topics we deem safe to talk about, and others we shy away from.
Money, for instance. The great conversational taboo. If you’ve ever tried to have a conversation with someone about their salary, you’ll know how trepidatious they can feel. It’s a lot like playing poker: everyone’s cards (salaries) are held close to their chest. No one will reveal—even at the very end of the hand—what they were dealt. And you sit there just hoping no one will call your bluff,.
I lost a valuable friendship over some silly squabble concerning money, simply because we didn’t know how to talk about it. What could we trust each other to share? What had made this something so difficult to talk about?
A fracture in our friendship was made. I felt that I was honest with my friend about everything, even the tricky topics. I felt, in her not wanting to share with me information that was neither important nor meaningless, that she had denied me the privilege of her candidness. She knew so much about me, and yet she wasn’t willing to tell me how much she paid for something? The price of a monthly transaction, costing our friendship?
It seemed so silly that both of us were resisting to engage in candidness because we had learned that money must be kept hush. That some things, even to the people who come into the toilet cubicle with you and know about your fear of intimacy, should not be shared.
In the digital age, information is wielded and reduced to carefully scheduled announcements—soft launches, hard launches, gender reveals, engagements—and carefully curated content—DIMLs, GRWMs. Despite it feeling as though we see so much of people’s lives, we are once again only privy to that which someone is willing to share.
It’s not surprising, then, that we really only see symbols of adulthood, as Jamal Burkmar perfectly surmises. Engagements. House purchases. Work promotions. Pregnancies. Weddings.
This, I’m finding, is certain kind of Sisyphean torture. Instead of repeatedly pushing a boulder up a hill, I experiencing the same conversation over and over and over again. At only 26, I have exhausted my ability to talk to someone about their newly acquired mortgage. I cannot form another opinion on the cut of a person’s engagement diamond.
Sometimes, something interesting does cut through my algorithm: an aspiring author, attempting to write their first book; intellectual women sharing their cultural analyses1; musicians sharing snippets of their latest work. To ‘stray’, as it were, from the narrative, and clear your cultural filter, is more courageous than you might think.
There is a type of person who withholds information as a way to maintain a sense of power or purpose. I’m going to call them Brick Walls. Candidness, to Brick Walls, is reserved only for certain people who have come to earn the privilege of knowing.
Talking to these types is like clicking on a link and getting a pay wall. If you’re familiar with scholarly discourse around pay walls, you’ll know that they’re quite contentious. Academics don’t think, under any circumstances, information should be guarded behind a fortress, made available only to those privileged enough to access it. There is not—and shouldn’t be—a hierarchy of what can be freely known, and what can’t. It only makes sense for this same philosophy be applied to the personal.
What makes a person worthy of knowing things about you? What makes information about you more valuable than information about anyone else?
If you, as a human being, refuse to be vulnerable and honest, you will inhibit yourself from ever truly being intimate with anyone. Intimacy is almost always the result of honesty and transparency. I mean, do you really think you’ll be able to have good sex if you can’t honestly, and likely a little awkwardly, ask if they touch you harder? Do you think conversations at a dinner table with your friends will ever be memorable if you don’t have the guts to say, “Sometimes I feel like I won’t ever be loved.”
Filterlessness, I believe, is an antidote to the privileging of information. A salve to the conversational fatigue we find ourselves in. The risk of being filterless is worth the potential for embarrassment or shame. I can think of many examples where, had I bitten my tongue for the sake of social propriety, I would have been denied a moment of connection, and interest, and enjoyment. Some of these are:
The forty-something year-old man I spoke to on the train from Clapham Junction to Gatwick Airport about how Australian men are quite sexist. Most women, understandably, wouldn’t talk to some overly-friendly older man, but this one turned out to be harmless, and I ended up having a good conversation.
The entire reason I have a friendship with my friend Amy is because, once upon a time, she was a roommate of a guy I had a crush on. I drunkenly went up to her, said hi, and we followed each other on Instagram. Long after that crush has been extinguished, I have a lovely friendship with a smart, amazing woman.
A lack of filter does not mean you are inconsiderate about what you say (though sometimes, admittedly, I say dumb shit). It is, instead, a mode of approaching interactions with people with openness and hopefulness for connection.
I understand it might seem crass, in theory, to tell the story of the time I was dry humped in a park by someone I’d just met. But let me tell you: it’s a conversational lubricant (pun very much intended) and I will continue to share that story—forever. I wasn’t dry humped for nothing—in the hopes I make a new friend.
get more of me here:
IG: @usingmyphd or @georgiannicholls
TikTok: @gnics
See: @/sithaamn and @/whatzaraloves on IG.