This topic has been living rent free in my head for almost a year now. Liz Gilbert says a good idea will hunt you down, haunt your mind, and eventually leave if you don’t give it it’s due. (totally paraphrased from her book, Big Magic)
So it’s time….
Somewhere around 2021ish the Facebook Gods handed me a perpetuous gift, my Facebook account got hacked and poof. Decades of online photo journals and stories of my life, children, their births, birthdays, travels and at that point dissolving marriage….gone.
I didn’t see it as a gift at the time, but now I realize The Universe was doing for me what I wasn’t able to do for myself. Start from scratch.
It was at this same intersection of life, the relentless and repeated comment of “But you looked so happy?” tumbled, repeatedly, from almost every single person when I told them I was getting a divorce. Wow, lightbulb moment. I had unintentionally created a social media white picket fence to hide behind….and honestly did a damn good job constructing it. The birthdays, and vacations, Holidays and homage to posts. They were all there, lined up. Liked and shared and commented on, when reality was so very different than the smiles and matching captions.
I will not do this to myself or people I know (even socially) again. Life is beautiful, messy, hard, complicated, confusing, rage inducing, exhausting, rewarding, a roller coaster of love and joy and happiness and unimaginable loss and sometimes just plain melancholy. I find it wildly difficult to screen roll you photos and stories and “moments” of high when the truth of my life is they are perfectly matched with magical struggle.
I could lament for days about how for me, it feels so inauthentic to share all about my daughters A-honor roll and chorus and softball accomplishments, or my son as he plants his garden and aces every spelling test with 100s, when the truth is my yard looks like something out of the Chronicals of Narnia, we quit baseball after the second game this year despite the fact that my son really loves the game, our shower has a clogg I loathe digging out by hand, gross! And frankly my decimal level of parenting raises 47 notches when I have PMS. Let’s put that in a tidy little post and press Publish! 🫶
10|10 Highly Recommend!
Reason #2. My kiddos are their own people, and one day they will grow up and realize I’ve chosen an online presence for them they never really had authorship over. There may or may not be implications to this, I’m not sure. But they need to be able to decide…so I stopped sharing everything for them.
Reason #3. True story. Ready for it. I declined someone for a job via email, and they then proceeded to google search my name, screen shot everything they found including my IG, a write up on my graduate studies from my Alma Mater and then told me they were glad they saw I had a face like a catchers mit, it made them feel better about not getting the job. People are disturbed. The end. I’m an adult and if I choose to put pieces of my life online, I deal with what comes with that. See reason 2. My children don’t need a head start on trouble…..or online stalking.
Reason #4 It’s hard to fight the comparison trap. Not posting helps me guard my heart.
If I ever compare my life to yours or wish or judge or think anything I see from another person, family, woman online that is ONLY a reflection of me and an internal battle. Not posting everything helps me stay out of the comparison game and in my own lane. Hard Stop.
So there it is…the post I’ve been wanting to post for like a year.
Am I going to scrub everything I have now and blur every online image of my kiddos, no.
Will I share the occasional back of the head side view pic of my kids, probably.
Are you going to get tired of seeing posts just about me, me, me, little me oh my, maybe.
Do I wonder what I’m gonna do when they go to prom and I want to share the heck out of all the special moments etc etc etc, for sure. Maybe I’ll ask their permission, I dunno. We will cross that bridge when we get there.
Am I going to heart and comment and LOVE honestly and sincerely when you post and share your babies and families and fun. YES! Yes I am. Because please understand. My feelings are only MY truth. They are born of my personal experiences and in no way are meant to project judgement or persuasion on anyone in anyway.
This post in no way assumes or states others should or should not post their own families or stories anywhere on the interwebs. Hardest Stop.
So there you have it. The blog post that has been living rent free in my mind for no less than 9 months.
Proof we do cool stuff, like watch the solar eclipse together.
Always in Love and Full Fledged Honesty,
Marjorie
Marjorie Hope 