One of my big blogger conflicts in the last couple weeks has been juggling two ideas that seem somewhat at odds with each other. First, I realized how bullshit it is to keep trying to pretend that things are sunshine and rainbows when they aren’t. Life gets hard and messy and I think that we do everyone around us a favor when we cop to that. Maybe it’s just me and my circle of friends, but our social media presences seem to function as trophy cabinets, where we present ourselves to the world as our achievements, as if that is all we are. We are our victories and our successes, proclaim the Facebook pages of basically everyone I know. That and, “Look at all the shit I read!”
Conversely, there is another group of people, mostly high schoolers, to judge by my newsfeed, who essentially use this space for public complaining, seeking others to indulge their self-pity. I’m not saying I wasn’t that kid in high school. I was all up on MySpace with my teenage angst. I am saying that I don’t want to be that person now.
Neither one of those things are really indicative of where I’m at right now anyway. Everything is not amazing right now, I am not reveling in my awesomeness and accomplishments, and it has been a while since I’ve had good new additions to the trophy cabinet. Similarly, everything hasn’t gone to shit either. I mean, yeah, realizing that I have screwed up makes me feel shitty, but I’m not 15 and I know it’s not the end of the world. My objective has mostly been to be honest, first, and hope that striking a balance between the two followed suit.
I don’t know what the answer to all of that is, either. I’m certainly not advocating for everyone to start moping about their issues, nor am I denying that maybe some of my friends really are as perpetually happy as their profiles would have you believe. Most of my friends don’t do this. They don’t put all their emotional vomit on the internet for funsies. I’m certainly not going to start sharing things on Facebook the way that I do here.
On a related note, I’ve stopped sharing posts from this blog to my personal Facebook. That isn’t to say that people I know can’t still read these things. They can and they do and I’m starting to think it’s time for me to revisit the privacy issue, because it’s one of many things that keeps on coming up. Anyone at any time can read this blog and I write this blog with that knowledge. That said, I assume that people coming here have a different set of expectations than people that I am Facebook friends with, for example.
This is a fragmented thought. I wanted to complete it — to say, “Now I see that the answer is clearly X,” but that’s not how it works. It’s something that I’m still thinking about and still sorting through. Like everything else in my life right now, it seems.