What You See.
This is the fourth time I’ve attempted to write a new post. I’ve been writing and pausing and starting over since July.
It’s September 8th today.
I saw someone post on Instagram this week about how it’s full of fake lives. Pictures edited to display perfect skin, homes staged to show picture perfect seasonal decor and clutter-free counters, words picked very carefully to describe just how wonderful people's lives are.
Everything glossed over and deliberately picked and plucked and covered to hide the pain and fear, sadness, anger, or the helpless feelings that this world seems to be sinking in.
If social media has taught us anything it is that fake sells, and a lot of people are looking to sell what they have.
They hide their realities from the world with their fashion and their dances, their makeup, and their instagram picture-perfect homes. They hide their struggles with depression, with self-esteem, with insecurity, with fear, with grief, with all the lessons and learning opportunities this world throws at us.
Our society has conditioned us to believe that being strong and showing no emotion, no struggle, no vulnerability, is a good thing and that to admit to struggling and needing help or counsel or simply to be alone, is something to be avoided.
I have to admit, I have been guilty before of leaving out the shit moments and posting the good ones, but in my mind, I’m posting the good ones because those are the moments I want to celebrate, to remember. But, as I think about it more, I realize I want to remember the shit moments too. The moments that made me cry until I couldn't breathe through the snot. The moments where I questioned everything I'd done and wondered if I'd made serious parenting mistakes, or if my kids don't remember the mistakes because I gave them all the love I could. The moments that make my eyes black with fury. Yes. That's really a thing. The moments of life that connect us all a little deeper, when we realize that we are not alone in our struggles.
This summer has been a challenge. On a journey inside myself, with a little help from some giants and some spirits, I am slowly working through grief I didn't realize I still carried with me. I am learning to release the anger and resentment of things that happened before, where feelings were never expressed or they were ignored.
I am on a journey to figure out the details of a life I never knew I had, and it can get messy and dirty, and loud when I can see that people aren't hearing my words or paying mind to my actions.
I make mistakes. I get angry. I get sad. I cry.
Some days I want nothing more than just to go back to bed and wake up tomorrow.
Some days I want to break something.
Some days I want to float away on the water.
Other days I want to climb to the top of a mountain and cry from the overwhelming beauty of it all, and the joy it brings me to be so far removed from all the people and their angry frantic chaotic energy.
It's a process, releasing things and replacing them with love, and there are definitely some days I feel like I’m alone in how I feel or the things I experience or think. I know there are other people who struggle with being vulnerable in a world full of anger and hate, and even though I feel like it sometimes, I definitely know I am not alone in this.
I hope from now on, you'll realize that you aren't alone either. My instagram feed, at least, will not be a picture perfect place to hide who I am, it will be a place where I can show you the crap alongside the rainbows.
I hope you'll do the same.
I hope you'll show the world it isn't all sunshine and roses, but that the good comes along with the bad.
That a balance is needed and that the bad is necessary to appreciate the good.
That what you see isn't always an accurate reflection of what is actually happening.
🖤
