Your life story isn’t a free sample. Hand out chapters to people who keep coming back.

Openness works better as a sequence than as a dump. Telling someone everything early can feel like intimacy, but it is mostly speed, and it hands your history to a person whose behavior you have not seen yet. Closeness that holds is built as each side risks a little and the other handles it well. The pace is part of the protection.

With someone new, share one layer and wait. See what they do with it, whether it comes back to you sideways, whether they offer anything of their own. Depth given gradually tends to last longer than depth given all at once.