Don’t Air Your Dirty Laundry in Public

Some people are very comfortable sharing their lives on social media.

Not just the highlights—the whole thing.

If they’re lonely, we know. If they’re anxious, we know. If they’re having a hard day, a hard week, a hard life—it’s all there, laid out in real time.

I watch that sometimes and wonder: is that helpful?

Not in a judgmental way. In a genuinely curious way.

Would it make things easier if I were like that?

Would I feel less alone?

Less… contained?

I wasn’t raised that way.

I was raised in the era of don’t air your dirty laundry in public. Your problems were your problems. The rest of the world didn’t need to hear about them—and, more importantly, didn’t particularly want to.

People have their own lives. Their own struggles. Their own quiet battles just to get through the day.

Why would mine matter more than theirs?

So you keep it to yourself.

You learn how to present well. You learn how to find the silver lining, to pull the lesson out of the difficulty, to say something that sounds… resolved. Even when it isn’t.

Especially when it isn’t.

I have a hard time sharing my troubles with anyone. Even people who have every right to hear them—my husband, a counselor, a close friend. The words don’t come easily. They don’t come at all, most of the time.

Instead, I put on my happy face.

I’ve gotten very good at it.

Most days, that’s enough to get through.

But some days are harder than that.

Some days, I can barely keep myself moving. I do what’s required—no more, no less. Just enough to get through the day without anything falling apart in a noticeable way.

And in the background, I’m aware of it.

I’ve studied depression. I know what it looks like. I know what it feels like. I know that I’ve been living with it for a long time.

Across the room, my husband is laughing at something—something on television, something he read, something in the world that still strikes him as funny.

And I find myself wondering what, exactly, there is to laugh about.

Not bitterly. Just… curiously.

How does he do that?

How does he find that lightness so easily?

He doesn’t understand clinical depression. And somewhere along the way, I decided that was fine—that it was my responsibility to keep my symptoms out of his way. Out of his face.

Manage it quietly.

Handle it.

Keep things running.

I’ve been doing that for a long, long time.

And at this point, it’s less of a decision and more of a habit.

A way of moving through the world without asking too much of it.

Without offering too much in return.

I still wonder, sometimes, what it would be like to say it out loud. To post it. To let it sit there, unpolished, for anyone to see.

Would it help?

I don’t know.

I do know this: the instinct to keep going, to keep it contained, to keep things moving forward—that runs deep.

So I keep doing what I’ve always done.

I keep it to myself.

And I keep on truckin’, as we used to say in the ’70s.