The truth about this post is, I didn’t have anything better prepared for a Monday posting deadline. As usually, university and work succeeded in preventing me from indulging myself in daily creative writing and regular updating of my blogs (although I did do a better job on Tumblr, so feel free to have a look there), so here I am again, struggling to put together a decent post in a short amount of time. Never leave things last minute, kids. There is no single way it can go well.
These days, I think a lot about living my truth. I didn’t come up with this perfect topic for crippling existential crises myself – if you want to see what set the gears in my head in motion, check out this video here. By nature, I am a very thoughtful and inquisitive person, and little would you know, I am also suspicious, distrustful and painfully realistic. Ask me any day of the week, and I would place living genuinely high up the priority list of any honourable human being, close to being kind and working hard. The simple idea of living a lie and being a fraud gives me the heebie jeebies: it is as if you’re not living at all. And it’s saddening to think that some people do it, out of (a lack of) choice.
But then, am I living my truth at the moment? Not entirely. Come to think of it, nobody does. There is only so much of our true selves that we feel comfortable with sharing with the world or with the people we choose to have in our lives. Out of all the people that I interact with on a daily basis, the majority have never and will never know anything about me. Those who do know me fairly well will never know all the facades of my being, all the personas that my identity incorporates. For all the relationships that I am a part of and that reached a certain level of intimacy and openness, there is a number of things I will always keep to myself. I won’t blame you if you throw up your arms in frustration right now, saying that it is perfectly natural to refuse to be an open book for the whole world to take a peek in, and with that I agree. It is in our survival instincts to want to shelter ourselves from any dangers arising from overexposure. But at this point in the 21st century, intoxicated by the tidal wave of technological developments and social media and the overwhelming desire to be good enough and accepted by the group, I feel as though my generation has gone too far.
I am currently twenty years old and, arguably, a young adult. With every day that goes by, I grow up and distance myself from the child that I once was, and so do my friends and people that I shared my childhood with. Some time ago I wouldn’t have been so confident in saying it, but now I know better than ever that it wasn’t just me believing it: people were terribly deceitful back in high school. Beyond straight-up lies and fabricated stories meant to either embellish or tear down reputations, people seemed to do anything in their power to be anyone but themselves. It was not everybody’s case, indeed, and with the people who knew better than that I am still friends today. But if we are to tell the truth now, none of us knew what the hell we were doing.
Posts without pictures are incredibly hard to swallow.
So, there you have a picture I took of the sunset recently.
(source: personal archive)
I choose to look back at it today because I’m wondering why some of us were shamed into concealing who we truly are, why we jumped in wars that were not even ours and did what the system pushed us to do. I’m wondering if this will continue into adulthood and I will lose for being myself truly and unapologetically. I’m wondering whether those younger than me experience this now. They most probably do, with so much toxicity and manipulation spread all over social media and so many opportunities to change the image of ourselves that we share with the world. And things shouldn’t be like this. People should be able to choose the careers that they want and get into relationships that bring them satisfaction and fulfillment. They should be able to dress the way they want, get wacky tattoos and dye their hair in unusual colours. They should be able to come out of the closet and celebrate their identity free of discrimination and negativity. They should be able to make mistakes and learn from them, and be imperfect.
I owe myself the duty to live my truth every day. I definitely don’t fully know what that means yet, but I’m actively trying to figure it out. A part of living my truth is writing this blog: it makes me happy, it provides me with a platform for creative exercise and self-expression and it prevents me from wasting my time. A few paragraphs ago, I chose to be honest with you and admit to the fact that I didn’t pre-write a post for today and had to improvise last minute.
Now if I think about it, living my truth might actually be easier than I thought.
Photo source: personal archive.
Photo edit: VSCO.