Facebook: Honest and Uncensored

Honestly, I'm a pretty happy person.  My life has been blessed with opportunities and love, and most of the time, I remember to be grateful.  I never want to take what I have for granted. 

But sometimes that's hard.  Picture this:

It's late at night on a Friday, and I'm home alone.  It's dark and it's cold, because I'm too damn cheap to turn on the heat, and I'm dressed up like a homeless person, cocooned inside a blanket, camped out at my kitchen table.  I stare vacantly at my computer screen.  I stayed in tonight in order to get some work done, but I feel completely uninspired.  I can't focus.  I keep snacking.  I'm bored out of my mind and beginning to flounder in self-pity.  I contemplate the ethical repercussions of stealing my roommate's bottle of wine, but ultimately decide against it.  Feeling sorry for myself, I navigate away from a blank word document and log into Facebook for the umpteenth time tonight.  Resigned to the idea that I won't actually achieve anything this evening, I allow myself to casually drift across the Facebook profiles of friends and acquaintances.  To me, in this moment, all of them look like this:
Click HERE to enlarge picture!

"How can this be?" I wonder as my immobile body slowly molds to the shape of my seat.  "How are their lives so effortlessly perfect, when I am alone, freezing, craving chocolate cake, and stalking them because I have nothing better to do with my sad excuse for a life?"  I relish this moment of tragedy, luxuriating in gloriously gratuitous self-pity, until, of course, I decide to take a look at my own Facebook page.

And believe it or not, it looks exactly like the others.  My Facebook profile does not tell the tale of a sad little girl alone at her kitchen table, it paints the picture of yet another perfect person who is confident, happy, and in control of her life.  Who is that person?  Can I be her?  Because it certainly doesn't feel like me. 

It's not that I--or anybody--actually means to LIE on Facebook.  It's just that we're selective about what we share.  We post news when we're excited or proud, "check-in" to restaurants when we're out celebrating with friends, and post pictures of our most thrilling adventures.  We're self-censoring, to an extent, and grooming our images like self-trained PR professionals.  Facebook isn't an honest depiction of life, it's an idealized snapshot of it.

Which is why I've decided to take one for the team, and really go public with an HONEST, UNCENSORED look at my life.  This is what my Facebook page would look like if it actually represented me:
Click HERE to enlarge picture!

It's a scary idea, being honest, and it's kind of overly personal, too.  You might not want to know that I dress like a homeless person, and I certainly don't want to see forty-five Facebook statuses about your recent break-up.  So I'm not demanding that we all stop censoring ourselves on the Internet.  But I guess I just want you to know that... I don't have my life figured out just yet.  I'm not perfect.  In fact, I'm wildly imperfect, and I'm willing to share that with the world.  Because it's honest.  And honestly, we're all kind of in this together, aren't we?


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Embarrassing Shit on the Internet

Once upon a time, this thing we call "the Internet" didn't exist.  We didn't have to read about our friends' politics on Facebook, and unless we were physically next to our friends at lunch, we had no idea what they ate.

For a few formative years, we played with real, tangible people and things so that we learned to speak in more than 140 characters and knew that poking was rude.  But technology advanced.  And before we were legal adults, we were having our every awkward, embarrassing, adolescent moment documented online for all of our "friends" to see.

When the Internet came into our lives, the first things we made were email addresses.  People used to care about forwarded emails; there used to be actual email threads.  It was our first encounter with dancing flower graphics and digital American flags.  We believed our forwards could cure people we'd never met of diseases we'd never heard of.  It was a magical time.

Eventually, our parents let us come up with our own AIM screen names, and by the time we were in middle school, we were using them every day.  We once invited dates to Preteen-Center dances under aliases like:

partygurl727

orlandobloomrox42

Wetkiss773

Alittlbtdramatic

Lilsportygrlmgs

lilsurfchick31

lazyboi8881

CAguysdoitbetter

ditzyblonde3242

MissKewl86

digitom91

Hottstuffaroo

It's obvious what was "kewl" at the time: spelling errors.  Also, apparently these "hott" 9-12-year-olds knew how to party.  I get the impression that while I was playing Oregon Trail with my cat, they were dressed up in their Limited Too finest and "wet kissing."

Personally, I want to remember myself as a kid who loved tea parties, Katharine Hepburn movies, and Irish rock.  I want to believe that I was cool.  But because the Internet butted its way into my life before I was a fully developed, semi-stable human being, it documents the embarrassing truth: that I WASN'T cool.  That's right.  I've been trying to bury this for years, but my first AIM screen name was KittyPwincess24.

This is what I imagine someone named KittyPwincess24 would look like:

 
Every day, we post things online.  We instagram photos of our breakfast as if anyone actually gives a shit, and tweet inane nonsense like, "Garbanzo beans!  Yum!"

Someday these things may embarrass us, just as we are embarrassed by our first screen names.  Someday (later tonight) I will regret having posted that photo which yes, is an impressively posed selfie of me.

Do as I say, friends, not as I do.  Remember when you were a QTpatooty32, and then DON'T post your embarrassing shit on the Internet.

Special thanks to everyone who sent me old screen names!  If I didn't use yours, don't be sad, be proud:  It wasn't quite as bad as the others.

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