She wants to lead the glamorous life
She doesn't need a man's touch
She wants to lead the glamorous life
Without love, it ain't much...
Sheila E.
Isn't that what we all want? The life that we see plastered all over social media - trips to foreign, exotic locales, bodies that resemble magazine ads, luxuries money affords...but what is it really? For me, without love, it ain't much.
Despite the fact that you are reading a blog that I started and share on social media, I am really a very private person. I am not all over Facebook showing you what is in my grocery cart, what I look like at the gym (I guess you have to actually go to the gym to photograph yourself there), a meme that describes my current mood or life outlook or what I am about to eat. I am not judging all of you who do the above things, I think it is great and as a social media voyeur, I completely enjoy looking and reading all of your posts and seeing what you are up to. But when it comes to my life, I just don't feel like what I am doing is all that interesting. It has only been recently, when I started this blog, that I even wanted you to know what I was thinking...let alone doing.
Recently, a friend of mine posted that she felt that her life was consumed with work and daily living tasks while everyone else seemed to be living a glamorous life. While I didn't comment back, it caused me to start thinking. I have totally felt the way she felt. In fact, every time I am viewing the larger world through the online filter, I feel that way. Well, at least I used to. But recently, there has been a shift in my focus. Instead of turning outward, I have been retrained inward. At first it was this minor outward shift in focus which resulted in a 180 degree shift internally.
For me, the virtual world became a vacuum that stole my real life. Hours spent on dating apps, Facebook, Instagram, email and texting...I didn't have time to be out there having a fabulous life because I was so busy updating and checking in all the time, that it was all that I had time for. And what was I really putting out there anyway? Very little that bore resemblance to my real life. I posted what I wanted you to see. For me, I wanted you to see very little so I posted very little: dating sites were equipped with one photo and a line from an F. Scott Fitzgerald novel, Facebook adorned with tags from other people, Instagram littered with landscape photos from my hikes. Don't even get me started about texting and emailing. Even with my limited and sporadic commitment to all of the above, it still ate a great deal of my time and energy. It left me flabbergasted at those that posted all day, every day. How did they have time to do anything but post, read, search for a meme and post again?
I was awed by the commitment, the dedication but it left me feeling so much less than on so many levels. Which caused me to start examining why I felt this way...what was it that all of this online stuff was bringing up? And what the hell was I supposed to do with it? What I came up with was this: I have this deep need to be connected to you and at the same time this need terrifies me. For me, that is what all the posting is about. We are all engaged in our busy lives but these busy, hectic lives hemorrhage intimacy. So we attempt to connect via the ethers while we are standing in line at Target or at a stoplight or instead of living the life that is happening right in front of us. For me, what I long for is to be cared for, loved for who I am regardless if the person I am currently being is kind of an asshole. For me, I had to be willing to redefine connection by deploying disconnection. I had to take a step back from the posting and the reading of posts and the photos and the constant billboard living that social media provides. I had to step back into the quiet and regain my ground.
What I realized was that I do have a glamorous life: filled with people who love me, things of great beauty, meaningful work, relationships that enrich and feed my soul. My problem was not that I lacked the indicia of glamour - just that I allowed my purview to become too large for me to keep track of it all. My world had to get smaller for me to be able to appreciate the connections I have and see that my life is glamorously mundane spiked with moments sublime. When I have the whole world at my fingertips, it is hard for me to see how my small little life fits in. When I shrink my world into a more workable (for me) design for living, I immediately see that I am rich beyond measure. There is no glamorous life more glamorous than the one that I have right here and right now. My key to seeing that was shifting my perspective and filters so that I became clear about what was important to focus on. I am not advocating that you adopt my world view, after all, you are not me and I am not you. I simply want to share that perhaps your glamorous life is already happening all around you, waiting for you to disconnect so that you can reconnect to what is right in front of you.
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