Multifaceted Me

Friday, January 6, 2012

Pinterest, YouTube, facebook and Real Life

I look at pretty things.  I watch tutorials.  I love hair and am embarking on the journey of locs for myself.  I pin pictures of all things Devyn.  But in real life, I'm plain.  Why is my internet self so colorful, brilliant and artististic while I am so....normal?

I get up in the morning, fumble until I find my glasses which I never put in the same place, make coffee or tea and proceed to cook breakfast in a robe that resembles a Snuggie with a house dress underneath and slippers.  I wonder what the virtual me would be doing?  Soaking in a tub three stories in the air watching the sunrise....holding her breath underwater and popping up with a huge gasp for air and laughing out loud at herself....  her life and my life are nothing alike.

Nor are they mutually exclusive.  It's me that chooses what's pinworthy.  It's me that takes such intricate hair tutorials and does the rushed version on myself.  It's really me who admires my own home, while not as creative as what I fantasize about online-it's still art.

For instance there is a pile of pistachio shells next to me right now.  Why?  Because I have a bowl of pistachios on the table and when I shell them I'm not thinking.  They become this growing pile of evidence that as type A as I can be-I'm also carefree.  There's a boy on my couch watching Cats & Dogs and even though it's a school morning and quite early, I don't mind.  I enjoy Kitty Galore singing, "I'm coming up!  So you better get this party started!"  This is my life.  It's not perfectly tucked and polished.  But it's still beautiful.

In fact, it's a beauty that cannot be replicated.  It can't be copied and slightly altered to tailor another's style or personality.  There can only be one me.  I'm not a picture or a song or a video.   I could never be summed up in a word or catchy phrase.  So why then when I browse the internet do I find myself feeling these twinges of jealousy-my hair will never look like that...I could never afford to decorate that way...-feelings of 'if only....'

More often than I'd like, I close my laptop with an idea that as much as I try to run with, she gets in the way.  The real me.  The one with children who interrupt her train of thought.  And instead of having the discipline to stay on task, she welcomes their questions, needs, curiosities and even interrupts herself to parent, take phone calls and other silly things like use the bathroom.  No one online is going to the bathroom.

This morning and this year I want to celebrate my real life.  All the things that make me, me.  The present contributions to the parts of who I am.  Sure, I have wants, goals and dreams-but if we stay focused on the future, the what ifs and if onlys-we may miss  or worse despise the present.  This morning I'm deciding that I don't want to be her.  I like her.  I admire things about her.  I enjoy browsing her albums, statuses, pictures and videos-but she is missing something so precious and intangible that it can't be captured in any of the aforementioned-breath.  You can't take a picture of it.  You can't describe it.  You can't teach someone how to do-it-yourself.  We all have it.  In different rhythms and depths and tastes depending on what we're doing.  Doing.  Living.  Breathing.

Celebrate your reality.

D

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