Are you or are you just pretending?
Stupid – is the object word not said in this phrase. Too often these days we’re living in a facade of our own creation. Social media, although very easy to blame, only plays a small part in our obsession with “keeping up appearances.”
We don’t want anyone to know we’re afraid.
We don’t want people to know the rest of our house not pictured in that last Instagram post is kind of a war zone.
We don’t want our friends and family to know that our marriage is really a lot of work, and hardly ever picture perfect.
We don’t want to tell people about our family problems, the drinking, the mental illness, the trauma, the sense of sadness, and the feeling of loneliness we carry around with us all the time. Because as soon as the camera is pointed in our direction we’re smiling and posing ourselves to make sure the digital version of our lives is enviable and worth piquing the curiosity of others. We want to put our best foot forward always, even if the world around us is shattering to pieces.
We’ve been trained to air our dirty laundry at home. To not give people a reason to second guess us as human beings, to not challenge the status quo because it could make the difference between getting that next opportunity in our careers or not. “Everything online is out there forever. You can’t take it back.”
In doing so, however, we’re also denying ourselves the opportunity to be truly genuine with one another. More importantly, we’re failing to learn from each other and our respective mistakes. I can’t tell you the number of times I’ve had a conversation with someone who went through the exact same thing I went through or something very similar, after the fact, when it was no longer an issue for either of us, and thought “Wow, if only one of us would have opened up about what we were going through when we were going through it, who knows how things might have turned out.” I’ve said that to myself about big situations way more than I have about small situations.
When you’re going through something, though – no matter how serious or not – that’s the only thing that matters at that particular moment. Who wouldn’t want to get advice from someone who’s already been through the same thing?
Who cares if their advice is not the best.
Just being able to desahogarte can do incredible things for you physically and mentally.
My life isn’t perfect. I’m not always happy. Some days are harder than others, and I second guess myself all the time. No sé if the path we’ve chosen is the right one for us. Some days I’m just scraping by a panzasos, but that’s the way life is for me – or the way I’ve chosen to accept it for now.
I guess that’s about honest for me for right now.
