Social Media is the Edited, Sugar Coated, Selective Parts of Our Lives
What are you doing right now?
Turn the television off, quit skimming your god damn newsfeed.
Our brains are filled with what we choose to feed them.
Feed them words that make you come alive, your insides crawl, your belly shake, hell even words that make you squirm.
Pick up a book--don't have one?
Jesus, well borrow one, right now.
Go in your bath robe with your morning hair and your coffee to a neighbor, to a library, a garage sale and pick up a musty delicacy.
Now, right now!
Choose your brain food wisely, there is too much garbage in our world.
You are a permeable membrane--if you absorb crap, well... You get the picture.
Social media is the sugar coated, edited, selective bits of our lives we choose to share.
We get all dressed up and show off and shove our polished lives in each others faces.
Look at my relationship! I'm so happy, he's great, we're in love--look at this picture, can't you see?
We don't talk about our insomnia, why we can't sleep at night-- or we do and it's dressed up in humour.
We don't talk about our darkness, our pain, our loneliness that crawls into bed with us some nights.
We don't tell the world we zone out and sometimes watch four hours of TV with our brains clicked off because we hate our jobs and our marriage and our husband and wives.
That we're too much of a chicken shit to get a divorce, and we have kids, right?
We don't upload selfies of ourselves crying, or straight out of bed with Flinestones hair.
Eating shitty KD because we're broke and got fired but are too embarrassed to say just yet.
We don't post a update that we only have 50 bucks in our account, that we are addicted to cocaine and drink to numb.
We paint, polish, perfect it all. Wrap it up nicely and put a filter on it and assume x many likes means we've got away with it all.
But you know and I know how we really feel, what we don't show or say.
We just feed each other shit and hope no one calls us on it. Figure if we're all doing it, it's okay.
It's okay till it's not--till your screen shuts off and your simulation wears off and you're face to to face with your shit.
And it doesn't think you look pretty with an Valencia, or an 1977 filter--nah it just stares you down and waits for you to tell it how you really feel.
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Janne Robinson is a Poet, Elephant Journal columnist, bushwalker and activist. She cuts kindling with her teeth, eats Bukowski and coffee for breakfast and makes the habit of saying the word feminist as much as possible.