[Vulnerability & Power - VIII]
We spend much our lives in the tension between the life we wish we lived and the life we actually live. The tension can drive us mad, send us into a downward spiral of regret, or tilt us toward depression. Many will take almost any measure and pay almost any amount to manage the distance between the ideal and the real.
Thank goodness for social media. Instead of going broke trying to perpetually travel (which makes being grounded truly impossible), we can take pictures of the most mundane outings and project to the world that we are adventurous travelers. Social media becomes our means of ostensibly living the ideal life we wish we lived. Onlookers will think we are living the life they idealize, too, the one they are in deep tension with. (Whether we do it intentionally or not, the medium inherently promotes this type of “networking”.)
Filtered “honesty”, curated content, and idealized projections distance us from others despite feeling like it draws us closer. So, while we sense we are sharing in the ideal, we are moving further away from the community we sincerely desire. It’s a half step forward and two steps back.
Unfiltered honesty, on the other hand, is not the curation of the life we want to live nor is it the network of friends we create that are all filtering their lives. Unfiltered honesty is first squaring up to the life we actually live, and then sharing that life with others. It takes courage, often hurts, but is the only threshold over which we can step toward community and family.
