I'm sure you've heard, time and again, that real life is not as 'glamourous' as it's portrayed by people on social media accounts.
And that's totally true. We, as people, like to impress and/or shock, so we tend to spin things to their fully exaggerated potential.
I hope that I personally don't do this - since I largely like to be honest with you lovely folks, and since most of my social media consists of me tweeting about how I want coffee. Because... well, coffee.
The Bestie will agree that this is a relatively accurate portrayal of my caffeine-habits
(though maybe not much else.) I am essentially made up of coffee and cake - which maybe isn't traditionally 'healthy' but I think they get ignored too much in our diets #JustSaying. ;)
Still, when interacting with other people online, an element of trust is required.
You guys don't know my real name
(because I'm paranoid about axe-wielding stalkers - it would be just my luck,) but you trust me when I tell you that I'm Welsh, or when I discuss my depression.
For all you lot know, those things may not be true (they are,) so there's definitely an element of you trusting me not to lie to you.
But the point has been argued (many times) that ignoring the mundane, the painful, or the less-than-glamourous, gives a less-than-accurate depiction of our lives - creating two of us: the online us, and the real us.
Now, from where I stand my life is pretty mundane all-in-all. It's only when I describe events to other people that it begins to sound like something that might be worthy of sensationalising in a made-for-TV movie.
Is this my fault? Is there something I do when I speak/write which makes things seem more exciting or dramatic than they really are/were? Am I subconsciously trying to make myself seem more interesting?
Or is it that we have a tendency to downplay things which happen to us? Are we trying to distance ourselves from the emotions they might cause if we looked at them objectively?
(Or is this just me with my depression-logic?)
I can sit here, in my living-room, legs crossed as one foot falls asleep beneath me, and tell you about the time I spent as a carer for my mother while she had cancer, or the days I suffered through gut-convulsions, which put a random end to my uni studies before they'd even started.
Or I could tell you about all the painfully-long days I had, when I was trying to work through my office temp. job, when really all I wanted was to not exist. I could tell you about the time I spent wishing to be dead.
But still, to me, none of that feels dramatic.
Because even the painful stuff was interspersed with very long periods of boring day-to-day life. And even that very same painful stuff just seems... well, like par for the course.
As far as I'm concerned, my life is, indeed, boring.
I'm not a jet-setter, I'm not a famous writer
(yet! fingers crossed!) and I've never been a militia-fighter or a drug-smuggler, or the CEO of a multinational corporation.
Yet if I think about the events of my life happening to someone who is
not me - say, a character on a TV show, or in a novel - they take on a dramatic hue that I didn't realise they had. Suddenly, my boring, average, life becomes something worthy of note.
And that totally baffles me. Because, like I said, in my life, they just felt like something that was. Nothing extraordinary - just life being life.
So maybe, just maybe, the real 'you' isn't the one you portray on social media
or the one you think of when you think of your day-to-day life.
Maybe it's a mixture of both - with a couple more ingredients thrown in for luck ;)
Nerd Church is a weekly post where I talk utter nonsense discuss topics and stuff like that!
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