Ok so the title perhaps sounds a little
harsh...do I mean that we deliberately don't tell the truth when we are honest
about our failings or our vulnerability? No. Do I mean that it is
never the whole truth? Yes.
You may know what I mean when I talk
about 'failure posts' or vulnerability posts as they are otherwise
known. There have been a spate of them on Facebook recently that I
have noticed (and yes...I too wrote one, you can read it here). These are honest accounts
of how life really is and how hard it can be to achieve the
success that you see in the 'wow look at me' postings of
others. Or they are a way of sharing difficult experiences so that
others might be able to take away comfort, greater understanding or a
feeling of not being alone, when they read them.
The 'wow look at me' posts I'm
talking about are the ones you see that say:
'How I made 30K in less
than a month'
'How I lost a stone in a week'
'How my blog went from
20 views to 100K in a fortnight'.
Given that this is not the reality
for the majority of people (it is also the truth for some), it
is hardly surprising that eventually people started feeling rubbish
enough about themselves that they started shouting 'er, nope, that's
not how it was for me' to make us all feel better again.
So now we have the backlash, the
honesty/failure posts...the ones that reveal the fact that you
haven't worn make-up for months and sitting in front of a computer
composing 'Oh my God I'm so in love with my life' posts just
means that you got fat and wobbly from not actually being out
enjoying that life. Are these just as fake as their counterparts? What should we believe? After writing my own failure post, which was indeed the most honest I have ever been online (even my family didn't know some of those things) - I considered this question of whether it was truly honest, not because it felt fake or contained lies (it didn't ) but because I realised it was a reflection of how I was feeling at that point and had I written it on another day I might not have said things in the same way, or shared them at all - because that would have been honest too - on that day, with those different feelings and that different perspective on life.
So should we be honest and raw in our
online presence or should we project an image that is appealing and
aspirational to others? Is there a happy medium? Are we really being
honest with our honesty posts or are we just offering a reflection of current feelings that could on another day be totally different?
Are we being honest in our honesty
posts?
The short answer is no, and yes. There
is an honesty there without doubt, things that are hard to admit,
that we debate about sharing in case they are too raw for public
consumption and may harm our reputation. We don't want to be pigeon
holed by an admission of the truth when that truth becomes a past
experience or state of mind that is no longer true. If you spill the beans on how things are not going so great but then they turn around and everything is going brilliantly will you forever be remembered for the time it wasn't so good and penalised for that?
The truth is only ever a
snapshot in time, a reflection of the present moment. What is true
for us at one time is not true at another. What is true for one
person is not true for all, and therefore full truth does not really
exist apart from in our minds or during a certain moment. The truth
is relative and expanding and changing and individual. Honesty posts
are honest in what they say but dishonest in what they leave
out...whether you are leaving out the good or the bad it is still not
entirely honest, just as 'wow look at me' posts are not entirely
honest. We are sharing a personal perspective from a specific period of time, not
telling the whole truth of who we are and it is important to remember
that this holds for both the positive and negative projections that
we share with others. Holding people to an image of who they were, or who they are right now, instead of who they can become is human nature to a certain extent, but it doesn't ever serve another to hold them in a space they are no longer in or no longer want to be in.
The movement towards more authentic
interaction and sharing the bad along with the good leads to some
interesting questions:
If we are all forced to be completely
authentic and everyone learns that everyone else is just as neurotic
and worried as we are and has days where they are ill or lonely or in
despair...does that mean there is nothing left to aspire to?
Does life lose it's magic if we
learn the truth?
Remember Christmas when you believed in
Santa Claus? It seemed so magical, so exciting, so wonderful to think
of this man coming down the chimney and delivering these amazing
presents. What is life without belief in a little magic? Do we really
want everyone to be constantly honest and remind us that the magic of
Santa Claus is not real? Remember the disappointment when you found
out that it was just our normal boring old parents delivering the
presents?
Do we secretly have a deep need for
our celebrities to be exciting creatures with wonderful lives, for
the President to be amazingly powerful and dynamic, for the Royal
Family to walk around in glorified splendour? Sure, sometimes it's
nice to see someone famous being normal but if we are all just
'normal' at heart then where do we look for inspiration to be more
than normal, to be spectacular? I think we need a bit of magic, we
need a few vanity posts, we need beautiful film stars and Princes and
powerful people to raise our expectations of what is possible, of
finding something magical.
So is there any real magic left?
Of course...you know there is some
intangible magical thread running through you when you feel emotion
too difficult to put into words...when you feel your child's fingers
close around yours and their head nestling into you for love and
comfort. When you fall in love and find someone who fills you with
desire and hope and joy. When you read a book that ignites a fire
inside you to be greater than you are today. When you see sorrow in
another's eyes and are moved to help them, to offer them your hand in
solidarity, to notice them and validate them. When you hear a song
that moves you to tears or laugh until your stomach muscles knot.
There is so much magic in the world, it is not for the few, it is not
for the successful alone, it is not just for men or just for women,
it is not judgemental, it does not only come after you have
meditated, read a certain book or made a certain amount of money –
it is there, all the time. True magic.
So should we be honest or be
aspiring?
I think we should be honest (read authentic...I think it is a much better description) – and
being authentic is about the good and the bad combined, it is honesty in all parts of who we are, rather than a series of
confessions of where we went wrong. Life is not all bad, or all good,
it changes, sometimes minute to minute, that is the honest truth.
So aspire to be greater
than you are, be honest in knowing that any part of truth spoken is
only a snapshot of a greater truth. Share the human experience in all
it's forms so that we can not only recognise ourselves and each other
but that we can remember that the outcome to life is never that we
rose or that we fell, but that we did both and we held hands across
the waves with each other as we did so.
Love Nova xxx
