#Letsgetreal
"Today I wanted to jump back on a plane and make it back to Iowa…" so begins my journal entry dated June 30, 2015.
"MOVING DAY OF HELL. First, we woke up at our motel and as we're about to leave we discover we have a flat tire. So we had to call AAA for roadside assistance that cost $85. Second, when we're going ahead with our move-in shit (I'm so thorough in my journal entries) we discovered that we actually had to pay $1890 to move in, as opposed to the $745 that I anticipated. I wanted to cry. That's not counting the $300 from the repair on the hole in the exhaust we gotta fix on the car. Third, we call the utilities company so we could set the gas and electric and the soonest they can do is NEXT WEEK. By then I was numb. My mom and I spent the rest of the day moving the stuff from the storage to the apartment. By the time I hit the bed I was so gone." -- July 1, 2015.
"…mom and I have been heating water to shower with a bucket at night. It's actually kind of funny." -- July 2, 2015.
I guess after a situation is already bad you might as well start laughing...
I wonder if the last time we talked I told you about these things. About the fact that I have no money, that my credit card bill is pretty damn high on all the expenses I incurred when I moved to New York, that I work a job that pays minimum wage, that I have purchased absolutely no groceries in the past two weeks, or that I go to sleep at night feeling horrible about my recent eating habits, my lack of security, and the fact that I can't even afford a new mattress that won't obnoxiously creak at night.
The amount of times friends and family have asked me in glazed wonder about my new life in New York I've probably said "Great! Still adjusting," because who wants to hear about all this other garbage? I mean...like apart from my mother? So let me tell you something for the next time you look at my Snapchat story and wonder about my charmed life: I have no money. That's the biggest worry. Most nights I come home to cereal. I avoid conversations with my mom about that because they stress me out. I wake up late in the weekends and the day gets away from me. I hate lack of productivity. I feel pressured. I miss so many people. I feel so transient, so ephemeral. I don't have half my shit figured out. Sometimes I reject invitations because well…I don't feel the push to make new friends just yet and my electricity bill will be greeting me real soon.
But let me tell you, not everything is half as bad. All those smiles you see and all that joy is real. All the hustle is also real. My exasperation with homework is real, as well as my sitting in front of Adobe Photoshop hours on end with my palms on my face. It's all real and crude. But real nonetheless.
I don't worry. It's one moment to the next.
But be clear on this: what I decide to post on social media is the final product.It is almost always beautiful. The picture I shot, the poem I wrote, my published article on Elite Daily…what you get to see is the thing that will get all the praise, all the comments, and all the likes. I don't get to tell you about that time I almost pulled my hair out, or when my software crashed and I had to start all over again, or when I spent a whole day working on something that was later deemed garbage. I don't get around to tell about in equal amount about my failures.
Some days I worry more. There are some days in particular when I search the web in a frenzy for internships and hate every single opportunity everyone else has already gotten; when I question my abilities as a creative. Because I do. I questions my abilities day in and day out. All the fucking time. But I've decided I do what I do for the love. I don't raise a finger because I think I'm good, but because I want to be. So below all the pretty flowing dresses I like to wear, my carefully curated Instagram feed, and my penchant for making fun of myself, half the time I really don't know what I'm doing. And it's aggravating but it passes.
There isn't a single wrong thing about wanting to focus on the positive aspects of life. Absolutely nothing. If anything that fixation pushes us to want to be better, to set higher standards, to aim to be like that one thing deserving of our praise. This is also the worst kind of roadblock. We easily tend to forget we're also entitled to a little breakdown from time to time. Because we don't tend to share our failures with as much impetus we often forget that that is also a huge part of this life.
Just think about that. The next time you feel inclined to assume yourself of lesser value, or the next time you think everyone else is leading a better life than you, think about that stinky impostor syndrome. We're all doing what we can. It's a cliche, but it is because it's so true--Everyone is fighting a different battle. If we all embraced that as well as we embrace comparisons, we'd be a million times kinder to one another; life a million times sweeter. So by all things that are heavenly, stop comparing yourself to your ex's new girlfriend, or feeling white envy over your friend's recent trip to Istanbul, or thinking that you're the only one at rock-bottom. In real technical terms, there's rock-bottom, 50 feet of crap, and then there's us. And everyone feels that way at some point. (Thanks, Rachel).
Do you remember when we were little and our moms asked us to clean our rooms and we'd just stow all our shit under the bed, moldy pizzas, crusty socks, and all? And then she'd be about to inspect and we'd break into a cold sweat? That's how I picture this whole deal of opening up and being real about the stuff that goes on behind the scenes. If our mom's our audience, what are we doing with all our junk? What is everyone else? It may be imperceivable, but it's there.
It does not matter what others are doing.