Social media is social media. Sometimes the pictures and announcements portray the truth of our happiness, joy, and hope. Other times, the pictures and announcements are to create what we wish the truth to be. It’s not always a malicious endeavor. We hope. We hope for…
Part of my writing journey is to share the truth that I would certainly want to hide. It’s scary. Downright terrifying. But it’s also liberating. I don’t need anyone to read any of what I have shared, but I know—and am released because of it—that I’ve said a truth. Any truth. Because every time I post good news, great news, I feel the importance of also saying, “This isn’t all of it. There’s more.” It doesn’t mean I’m wallowing in pain. Maybe I am, but maybe I’m just showing that pain and joy can coexist.
I’ve had this blog for over a decade. I’ve shared during my worst of human experience thus far. And my hope, my hope is…that it remains the worst, that it will only get better from here. Or there. The “there” that was mental illness, substance abuse, unemployment, isolation, and abandonment.
Yet it is better. I just got hired by the New York Times. They got in touch to say they’ve read my writing and want to know if I’m NY. I’m not. Yet I’m moving there in August to start a writing degree at Columbia University. And my honest truth: I may not finish it. The way I struggle, it may be one more unfinished ventures that I have too many of to count.
It is no coincidence. I’ve agonized in prayer for five years over getting into a graduate school program with money to pay for it. I’ve already turned down offers that came with no scholarship. Over the years that I prayed, I acknowledged that if I got into a graduate school program without any money to finance it, it didn’t come from God. I withdrew from offers in agony to honor that it wasn’t from God. It wouldn’t be an answer to the prayers I’ve cried out of my mouth and out of my heart after years of a broken career path punctuated by struggle.
Now that it comes, now that I have a scholarship, now that the NYT has hired me with the question of “do I live in NY?” I can rejoice. Yet my rejoicing doesn’t change the heartbreak and turmoil that I face with the very diagnosis that stalled my life, made it into a dry dust swirling through the desert with nowhere to go and no origin to identify where it came from.
It still hurts. I still hurt. And I write this to say:
No matter what social media tells you, people are still hurting. Some people are hurting so much that they lie on social media just to envision what life could be if only they had the ability to live it.
The truth of the matter is that truth often becomes what people want the truth to be—not what it really is.
Look: Evolve 