Social Facade

We live in a  social media era.  We live in an era of careful crafted and controlled personal appearances and perceptions.  More and more it often seems the case that what we want to live and been seen as is our Facebook updates or online avatars, where generally we do no wrong, our teeth are straight and our kids are doing well in school.  But the reality is in fact that we are the same people we ever were, with the faults and flaws that we carry inside.  We just kid ourselves that they are less relevant.

However there come moments where the facade is removed by others - often unsuspectingly - and the soft underbelly is revealed.

Such an incident happened to me yesterday.  It was a chance conversation that I was tangentially involved in - but one for which the words stuck in my heart like arrows.

I reeled back in internal confusion for a moment.  Not me - I was not this way.  I mentally started making a list of all the ways I did not seem like that and all the ways I did not share those characteristics.  The instant justification and vociferous voicing of my inner defender surprised me with its intensity.

And then I stepped outside of myself for a minute and tried to look at myself, not as I would from a social media standpoint (how carefully we choose our pictures of ourselves that we want to show to others) but simply from the cold hard facts of the words.  And looking at it that way, there were shared similarities.

It is odd how we couch the evil in ourselves as not as a bad as it really may be.

It provoked a good afternoon of thought which was needed.  But what it really provoked was a re-examination of my own life - not as I present it to others, but as it would be presented if my own thoughts and internal dialogues were put on display for the world to see.

In such a case, I fear my social media facade would scarcely match the internal things - the "me" that I like to gloss over" - that I know are within me.