Oversharing online; is it a cry for help?

So, I just watched Dodie’s video on oversharing online, and it gave me a lot of thoughts. I’m someone that also puts a lot of my mental health stuff online, and I’m getting to a point where I’m starting to rely on it as an outlet. To me, it helps, just to get it somewhere that isn’t my head. However, she talked about a couple of things that I thought were interesting, and one of them was that it might be a cry for help. 

Being a YouTuber, a whole heap of her life is online, and her YouTube friends are all watching and reading what she posts. So, it could seem like she wants them to see it, and come to her and ask if she’s okay. She wasn’t entirely sure if that was what she wanted, but she did admit feeling a bit embarrassed after certain posts. For me, my blog has always been really private, and a big part of my mental health is that I feel like a burden, so talking on here is the perfect outlet for me. No one is going to worry about me, but I still get to talk. Now, though, my friends are (or at least, sometimes) read my posts, and all my sad stuff has just… gone away. I mean, it’s still in my head, but it sure as hell isn’t on here. It comes back to that burden thing, and me not wanting them to know that I need help. If something was really wrong, I could go to them (well, probably), but most of the time I don’t feel like I need to, or I don’t want to. And don’t get me wrong, I know this is a problem, but we’ll talk about that another day. Maybe. Anyway, it was interesting to me that talking about your problems online could be looked at as a cry for help, when to me it’s the opposite. I don’t want to cry out for help, so I come here instead. 

The other problem that her friend Hazel thought was the main one was that it can be incredibly triggering for people who suffer with similar sort of stuff. And I completely understand that! Dodie does a lot of her stuff over Snapchat, so it can come out at the most unexpected times. I think blog posts and YouTube videos are different, because you have a warning through the title, and you can choose to stop reading after the first introductory lines. In saying that, though, I unfollowed a person quite recently because it felt like all she was talking about were her mental health problems. I couldn’t deal with it at all, it was too much for me. I try to make sure I mix it up with some more positive stuff, but when my head is a Mess, I might not feel able to write much that’s positive. And although it helps me to write the sad stuff, do I need to consider you, the reader, more? Am I being unfair on your brains by writing endless sad stuff? Or, should I just assume that people will read it if they want to, and ignore it if they don’t? Can it actually help, knowing you aren’t entirely alone? 

I definitely have way more thoughts on this video, especially in relation to me, but it’d get to a point of just too many words. So, let’s discuss! What do you think? How much do you post about negative stuff? Should I put me before you, or is there a healthy mix of both somewhere?