We've all fallen afoul of it, even before social media, the internet has just made it that more pervasive. I finally have a great family photo (mostly because I didn't try taking it myself), looking at that beautiful picture (even with me in the photo!) I can't believe that lady has such a nice, beautiful family and such a great life! Wait, that's me! Yep, it's my family and I think that lady's life (mine!) must be all sunshine and roses, but even taking that picture wasn't sunshine and roses, let alone getting to the place where our family could actually look like that! How often do each of us see something that triggers that sort of thought and the inevitable jealously and disappointment with our own lot? How often have we configured our pictures and social media content to portray the ideal life rather than being real, most especially with ourselves. Even my son's school pictures offer me the ability to pay extra to airbrush the kid, that we can remember him as he's never really looked?! Can this culture, and we ourselves, get any more feckless, insipid, shallow, and utterly focused on the externals?
Take our perfect picture for example. I just wanted a family snapshot, taken by a friend of mine with my camera. She's a photographic perfectionist and decided she'd do a mini photo session approximately 20 minutes before our husbands and sons had to leave! We trekked all over her woods, getting bit by mosquitos, my toddler crabby and uncooperative, her unsatisfied with anything so far. Finally she plopped us down on a hillside and a cat miraculously appeared over her right shoulder some 20 feet behind her, enchanting my otherwise unenthused daughter, and there it was, a family picture worth smiling about, but you wouldn't guess the trouble and effort and pure good luck that went into that shot. Nor would you think about the abuse, neglect, infertility, job loss, chronic illness, debt, adoption, and the other thousand little sorrows and tragedies behind those smiling faces, the stuff that never makes it onto facebook. We're just another smiling family that has it all together and has never suffered even a rainy day, let alone a life of struggle and pain, except there is no such thing! But if we never admit we have problems, we never have to deal with them, we never have to face the messiness that is life, yet neither can we heal and learn what it is to actually live and love.
There's nothing wrong with a nice photo, but there's everything wrong if that photo is what you've convinced yourself that your life or someone else's is. Behind those smiling faces are sleepless nights, tears, disappointments, grief, and loneliness. But we don't need to live like that, pretending we have it all together when inside we're falling apart. Forget airbrushing your life, be real, especially with yourself and allow others to do the same, that's where real friendships and relationships and love can thrive, healing those things we thought we'd carry the rest of our lives, chronic and unhealed. But it's messy, it's slow, uncomfortable, and we can't even pretend to be perfect, but that's what reality means. Our thoroughly edited virtual reality has about as much in common with real life as that airbrushed photo portrays who you are on the inside, or who you are when no one is around to make you smile on command. Let's make the real thing more interesting and three dimensional than your latest social media post; be real with yourself and others, and allow them a safe place to do the same.
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