Welcome to Remix Month, where all this October I will be bringing you 5 posts from my archive that still resonate with me, and hopefully resonate with you too! Today we’re heading back to the 19th of April 2019, to talk about how life can be hard, and that’s okay…
We seem to lead such singular lives these days, meaning that you may feel like the only person out of 100, and that the other 99 are all fine. Well, just like Lady Gaga, I will be your Bradley Cooper, not everything is okay all of the time, and I believe in you.
A large amount of not feeling okay, and the insurmountable emotion that life is hard, can be traced. I think that I can trace this to social media, which is ridiculous because I spend a lot of time on Instagram. Yet I know that some days it can drive me crazy, and make me even more miserable than I was to begin with.
You know what, sometimes I think that social media presents a very small portion of the truth. We only see the most filtered and perfected parts of a lot of people's lives. We spend less than 5 minutes with them, yet somehow their handle of life will make you feel like you haven’t achieved anything, and that their life is so perfect.
Yet it is very rare to see anyone actively discussing their bad day, the crap that they are going through, or even discussing their health. It makes me think that a lot of us are interacting with false representation. In some ways, it is easy to see why so many people are so anti-social media.
I am just as guilty as anyone on social media when I feel anything less than my best I reduce my output. Curb the stories I know people love and basically operate with a reduced service. Showing the least amount of the things that I am going through. I do this because firstly I don’t want people to feel sorry for me, and secondly, I don’t want to drain people’s moods with my negative energy.
Yet if more of us talk about the things that we are going through more often, it wouldn’t feel like such a sharp change in the service we run. We need to be honest and highlight that life is hard, so that we create a community of people who are honest, instead of super-polished perfection that ends up alienating people.
I would sit and tell you, that I scratched my new car, which I have had less than a month. That I am incredibly intimidated by other people's success, and that it can make me ill with jealousy. That I miss people who used to be in my life but have moved on without me, and that I find that incredibly hard to deal with. That most days I worry about my progress in life, and nearly always feel crap about it.
You see, the pain, angst, and fuck ups that life throws at us is natural, and something is part of the deal in being humans. The ups and downs of our lives become the journey that we look back on, it fuels our growth and our strength to face the future. We cannot say we bloomed from the struggle if never admitted we struggled in the first place.
Honesty is the best policy, and let’s hope it gets rolled out to the way we all interact with each other.
Shot by Rachel Pechey
