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I’ve been oversharing online for over 20 years now via blogs, message boards, away messages, the music on my Myspace page, and now tweets. I tend to be pretty open about the things in the immediacy of my life—sex, dating, celebrity crushes—and hold close the foundation of me, like family and childhood. If you want to get to know me more deeply, it won’t necessarily be in the ephemeral bits I share online, but in my more substantial, creative writing like my poetry, personal essays, and now a memoir. When I first started writing and reading poetry as an emotionally sensitive teen, I gravitated toward the confessional, poetry that centered the personal, usually written in first person. For a long time, I battled with the way people saw me versus the way I knew myself to be, so writing the I of myself was how I regained control of others’ perception of me. I talk about sex frequently, because I think it’s important for women, especially Black women, to be able to express desire and pleasure without shame, but I am a silly, complex woman who is more than her tweets, more than her work.
When I was younger, I often wrote in diaries and asked for extra spiral notebooks in my school supplies to write down ideas and stories. My family considered me a rebel, because I often questioned why I had to do something, instead of blindly following along for the sake of peace, like my older sister and younger brother often did. I didn’t feel like a rebel; I just wanted to know why I had to be like everyone else around me. And I didn’t much like being a child, because people were often trying to tell me how I felt. If I said I felt sad, an adult would respond with something like, “You ain’t sad. You just want me to buy you something,” or, “You just want attention.” The major depressive disorder diagnosis I received in my early 40s helped bring all those inexplicably sad moments of my youth into relief, but until then, I turned to my first writing love, poetry, both to deal with the blues and to have a safe place to vent my frustrations at no one taking me seriously.
I discovered poetry when I was around eight years old. I found a book called The Black Poets, edited by Dudley Randall, and fell in love with the history of Black American poetry presented in its pages. When I was 10 years old, Prince’s album Sign O’ the Times was released, and it featured a song called “The Ballad of Dorothy Parker.” I went to the library to find out who Dorothy Parker was and learned she was a very witty and sometimes sad poet. I felt called to her work, not only because of this loose connection to Prince, my favorite artist, but because of the way she used her poetry to correct people’s assumptions about her or to prove them right. Parker was sharp and honest, sexy and melancholy, and I thought, I can be this way too.
Within the first hour, maybe even 30 minutes, of getting to know me, you’ll learn I’m Southern, I love Prince, and I love romance novels. I love love and the thought of a happy ever after. I do not like the dating part of finding love. I know I’m not alone in this. Dating apps were supposed to help make things easier. I’ve had moderate success when it comes to casual flings, but as my career progresses, and my name becomes more Googlable, I find myself hiding more of who I am from the guys I meet and sharing less of myself online. With a new memoir out, I’ve started to feel like I’ve shared enough of myself in public.
Your dating app bio should be clever, short, and sweet. Your profile pictures should be clear, with at least one full-body shot, so no one accuses you of misrepresenting yourself. For a few weeks in 2018, I had a picture of myself signing a poetry book I’d written. I looked cute in the photo, but I also wanted it to show I was a “real” writer, and not like the guys who’d respond, “Oh, I’m a writer, too, but I’ve never published anything,” after I told them what I did for a living. I’d made a point to pick a picture that I thought obscured the book title and my full name, but it did not stop men from taking a screenshot, zooming in on the cover, Googling me, finding my social media, and reading up on me. Honestly, I don’t begrudge them that. I try to look up potential dates too. What bothers me is how some of these men would focus on my more salacious content—the silly tweets about cunnilingus or the outrageous fantasies about celebrities—and think that is all there is to me. It’s easy to toss off the useless desire of wanting Hozier to slide in my DMs, but far less so for me to be so flip about body-image issues or my relationship fears.
I eventually took the picture down and began revealing less of myself to the men I met on dating apps, which is pretty much the only way I’m meeting people to date. If they see me as a real person and not just a masturbatory device, they start to ask me for details about what I do and who I am, but I try to keep it vague while explaining I want them to learn about me from me, and not from a Google search. Sometimes my resistance intrigues them, and they think I’m famous.
I quickly shut down talk about me being famous, because I am not and because I don’t want them to think they can take advantage of me somehow. One guy joked it was a good thing I wasn’t famous or else he’d give a tell-all exclusive to TMZ. At that point, we hadn’t even met yet, hadn't even moved to texting away from the dating app, so I immediately unmatched.
That’s become a real fear of mine: that what I share online will be weaponized against me. I’m not so much concerned about cancel culture, as much as I’m concerned about being misunderstood and misread. In my memoir, I talk about wanting love and finding it however I can. It’s been an embarrassingly long time since I was in a committed relationship, which is something I’d like to have again. When I’m scrolling through social media, and I see people posting lovey-dovey images or short videos of them and their partners, I sometimes feel a quick pang of envy, but then I start to wonder if I’ll be so open about a future mate online. I used to tell my friends that I’d be so gooey with my next relationship, posting “baecation” photos and filling my Instagram Stories with pictures of us, but I don’t think I’ll do that now. I can see myself doing a boyfriend soft launch one day—maybe dropping a picture showing his forearm across the dinner table, but not much more. As I’ve gotten older and watched the stages of relationships online, I’ve subscribed to the philosophy Issa Rae recently highlighted about people who share too much of their intimate lives, and then are left mortified when the relationship ends: “Let me embarrass myself. Don’t let a n*gga embarrass you.”
I’ve also learned to protect the things that bring me joy in a world that encourages us to make every aspect of our lives fodder for content. I’m sure I’ll continue to write about relationships, because that’s how I express myself and how I earn a living, but the world doesn’t have to get all of me.
So much of my work centers me as I hope to show people I am more than their assessment of me, and I don’t regret anything I’ve shared, but I’m slowly pulling a curtain around myself. My memoir is more of myself than I’ve ever shared before. It’s easy to delete tweets or make accounts private or hide blogs, but a book is, in many ways, forever. I am exposed in new ways, and until I figure out how to handle that, I will retreat a bit, protect the me it’s taken so long to grow into. And if I find someone I can love and take solace in, if I find someone who deserves all of me—the stuff that’s Googlable and the secrets—I will protect him too.
Nichole Perkins is the author of Sometimes I Trip on How Happy We Could Be (Grand Central Publishing, 2021).