As I sit here wrestling with the looming doubts of sharing my life on a public social media page, scrolling through curated accounts that clearly have a point of view and a purpose, I wonder: What is my thing? The thing people hear about or see and immediately think of me? I honestly don’t know. I’m sitting here writing a blog and sharing my life on the internet and I don’t really know what my point of view or purpose are. There are things I enjoy but I’ve never been one to have a full-blown passion. This lack of a “thing” makes it hard for me to fully relate to people in general, but it also makes building and maintaining friendships incredibly difficult for me. How does one make friends without sharing a passion? How does one keep friends without sharing special moments and events? How does one even have friends, let alone a social media presence without a “thing” to relate to?
In all honesty, at 37 years old I have no idea who I am or what I actually like. If this sounds like a wholly overwhelming and dramatic existential crisis to you, well… it is. There are days where the absolute uncertainty of who I am or what I like completely consumes me and the best way I can describe the accompanying physical feeling is: hollow. I get out of bed, I put on clothes, I get the girls ready for school, I go to work… but it’s like an out of body experience for the entire day. Everything that needs to happen is happening via autopilot but there is no joy or sadness; I’m just existing, unsure of how to snap myself out of it. I spent so much of my first 30 years trying to people-please, to fit in, to be liked that I frequently stand in the mirror wondering if I like my outfit or if it just feels safe from the scrutiny of other humans. I don’t know if I actually like cinematic epics or if I just pretended to for so long in a futile attempt to get a male of the species to love me that I’ve classically conditioned myself to react to them with excitement. Is purple even my favorite color, or do I just think it is because we moved into a house that had a room with purple walls and purple shag carpet that became mine by default? This particular crisis has been the topic of an immeasurable number of therapy sessions over the last 20 years. As a stepping stone towards knowing myself, my therapists have all recommended ‘doing something just for me’ which is genuinely a wonderful recommendation for all human-kind, but just brings me full circle because I don’t KNOW what I like to do ‘for me.’
I saw a social media post recently that said something along the lines of ‘so much of figuring out who you are as an adult is reconnecting with things you enjoyed as a child,’ and that actually shook some cobwebs loose for me. What did I enjoy as a kid? More specifically, what did I enjoy as a kid when I was at my mom’s? Not only was my mom’s house exponentially safer both emotionally and physically, but it was also a space in which I spent a significant amount of time with myself. I’m still very much in the process of sorting through my brain, but my first draft short-list of things I definitely like includes: LOUD clothes, 90s R&B, bright colors, lame puns, reading, and talking to people. To the casual observer, these revelations likely don’t seem ground-breaking, leaving you to wonder how I could have possibly lost sight of such simple, tangible joys? The short answer is… trying to make friends (read: trying to be liked).
I don’t know what it is, I’ve just never felt like I belonged there.
Candice
The irony of feeling completely comfortable sharing my life on the internet while not feeling remotely comfortable in social situations is not lost on me, but here we are. For as long as I can remember, I’ve felt the most comfortable with myself when around people who didn’t fit societal expectations of who I should be around: the misfits, the disenfranchised, and the marginalized. Trust and believe that when I look in the mirror every morning, I see a white suburban cis woman in a heteronormative marriage, but I do not typically feel comfortable around other humans who fit the same description. I don’t know what it is, I’ve just never felt like I belonged there. I always identified with the Wednesday Addamses of popular culture while preferring the outfits of Lizzie McGuire, both of which ended with me being teased. With the outcasts everyone knows what it’s like to feel looked down upon, judged, or dismissed for simply existing as themselves. Rather than being able to stick with the group I’d found in junior high, my high school went through a pretty grand upheaval that was called consolidation and I honestly got lost in the shuffle. I latched on to the nearest circle of misfits (metal kids) and yet I was still trying so hard to be taken seriously I let go of everything that was me and tried to force myself into their mold. Someone trying to be so desperately liked is generally rather unlikeable. Although my new group accepted me, they probably would have done so if I had just remained true to myself, as well.
Allow me to interrupt myself with a brief and entirely true anecdote about me trying to fit in. Picture it, MA camp for Drum Majors, summer 2003. I’m at a table in the Ashland University cafeteria with a group of fellow Drum Majors. They are all from affluent private schools, sporting Abercrombie clothes and engaging in early-2000s-teen-movie style shenanigans. I’m sitting there silently in my heavy black eyeliner partly because I have nothing to add but mostly because I’m petrified that they won’t like me or worse– that they will make fun of me behind my back. Someone bites into the black gumball eye of a Spongebob ice cream, turning their tongue black and reminding me of an episode of ER I secretly watched in 5th grade by standing behind the couch where my parents couldn’t see me. In my excitement to have something to say, I blurt out “You look like you just overdosed on Valium!” and am met with the dreaded silent stares followed by a rapid subject change. No one talks to me for the rest of the week. Yes, I know it was a super weird thing to say, but on the flip-side I could say the same weird thing in a group of misfits and not become a pariah. Would I be read for filth? Absolutely, but I would still have friends at the end of the day. I’m positive that none of those other humans remember this interaction at all, but it still lives in my brain rent-free 20 years later.
Long story long, it was just less scary to make myself look and act like the people I was around (or wanted to be around) than it was to risk being myself and potentially end up alone. Hindsight being 20/20, I can now see that I had people who just wanted me to be myself, and in forcing myself to be someone else, not only did I lose me but also the people who had my back. Along that dark and twisting path of trying to find where I fit, I completely lost all sense of what I actually enjoy and what I find to be relatable. I’m sure I am not the only person who changed who they were for the sake of fitting in. I’m not the only person who is unsure of how they can put themselves first. I’m probably not even the only person who wonders if they are doing something because they like it or because they are expected to do that thing. I know all too well the sting of FOMO caused by social media. I know what it is to feel like a failure because you don’t have impeccable style, or the time to work out let alone post videos of you going hard in a cute little matching set. I know how much it hurts to see people you love spend time together without extending an invitation. I don’t have it all together, and I don’t really know where I fit, but I know social media can easily make me feel terrible and the last thing I want my content to do is inflict that feeling on someone else.
You may be wondering what would I like to get out of social media if its current offerings are making me feel this way. It’s really quite simple: I want to hear more about people who feel like me and I want to share more of my own life and experiences. Yeah, I’m a mom and I talk about it a lot because right now raising my kids takes up about 97% of my day, but there is so much more life that I want to talk about, too. Of course I want to see and share joys and passions, but I also want to see and share the ugly stuff: the mid-healing-process-crying selfies, the frustrations, the messes, the half-done renovations, the honesty of life. We’re living in this spectacular age where we have access to so much information and so many people around the globe, yet somehow we’re still stuck in this generational game of Keeping Up with the Joneses (or I guess the Kardashians). I don’t care if your house isn’t clean – mine isn’t either. I don’t care if your kids are heathens because SAME. I don’t care if your clothes aren’t in style or your body has changed or who you love or how you pray. I just want to be unapologetically me and for you to be unapologetically you. (Unless you are a racist/sexist/homophobic/transphobic bigot. Then you should probably apologize at least a little.)
What do I find relatable? Real life. Sure, a beautiful picture with a profound caption can be moving. Someone celebrating themselves and the things they love can be uplifting. Someone sharing a struggle they’ve overcome can be inspiring. But more often than not, what I have to offer are those moments that aren’t so picture perfect: morning coffee in pajamas that don’t match and a messy kitchen with fluorescent lighting, kids fighting over a single crayon on a rug full of smashed Cheerios, the weekend deep clean, the days where depression wins, the times when your kids and/or partner just make you want to pull your hair out and scream… Those are the moments I need to see more of, the moments when I just need reassurance that I’m not failing just because I have neither a perfectly spotless, immaculately decorated home nor angelic children in clean and stylish clothes that actually match. Of course I still want to see the things that bring you joy (no matter how “cringe” they are) so please don’t think I’m imploring you to stop. I just want all of us to feel safe sharing all the stuff, even if it’s not picture perfect.
I know how hard it is to share a photo that you don’t find to be beautiful, but it’s a snapshot of your life. Your mom didn’t refrain from carting around photos to brag about your 5th birthday just because there was an ashtray with a smoldering cigarette on the table (hey millennial’s!), and you shouldn’t stop sharing your stuff just because you think it’s not pretty enough. Real life is messy and we shouldn’t shy away from that. We’re all going through the same things but we’re too afraid to let anyone see that sort of vulnerability. I don’t think writing this down is going to change the world, but it might just change my world. I still don’t have a “thing” by what I would consider a standard definition, the thing that others know to expect from me or to share with me, but then again maybe my thing is simply transparency. Maybe if I try to be a little more vulnerable, share a little more mess, a little more joy, a little more WEIRD, maybe someone else will feel comfortable sharing theirs, too.
