Just Give It Time

“Quiet landslide that nobody knows. Regretted decisions that nobody chose. Underwater, sinking fast. No way out, no way to get back. What might have been is lost in the past. Just give it time. It’s gonna get better. Now is not forever at all. Just give it time, and everything changes. Tomorrow comes, today will be gone. Everything’s gonna be all right. Just give it time…” –Jon McLaughlin, “Just Give It Time”

Social media is a liar. That’s the most simple, straightforward way to put it. We filter our pictures to make ourselves look better, but we also filter everything we post to make our lives look better. We manufacture our looks, our relationships, our families, and everything else we do on social media. We often do this in life, too, not letting people see the real us, the struggling us.

In one of my lectures earlier this year, we did an activity where we passed balloons around the room and wrote something positive about each person on their balloon. I was described as a ‘smiley,’ ‘always happy,’ ‘adventurous,’ ‘positive person.’ It’s interesting because I’ve had so many people from my past, even people I went to school with 20-something years ago, who have told me they admire how ‘adventurous’ I am and love following my travels around the world. I’ve never really seen myself as particularly adventurous (or ‘brave,’ which is the one I hear most that gives me a good laugh). These things just show that either people see me differently than I see myself or that really good at showing a certain side of myself. Introverts like me internalise every little thing and struggle internally, letting only those closest to us get a glimpse at the truth. I imagine that extroverts do the same to some extent. We’re all just big liars, determined for people to see us a certain way. It’s like we’re all wrapped up in a big conspiracy, a self-created web of filtered lies and lives, designed to fool one another.

Hell to the liars. Here’s to you and me.

“Life isn’t fair. It’s just fairer than death, that’s all.”

Let’s get real. We all have times in our lives when we think it’s finally our turn, the light is finally changing. Then something happens with the potential to monumentally change the course of our lives – and us – in a heartbeat. It can force us to open up and be vulnerable. That’s what happened to me last year. When I had my knee injury, I never anticipated it would affect me as long as it has or in the ways it has. I may be about 85% recovered by my own estimates, but the effects are long-lasting and still affecting me now.

I’ve always been a private person, keeping people at arm’s length, and respected the privacy of others, letting people open up on their terms without pressuring them. I’ve had to take a lot of taxis recently, forcing me to make small talk (an introvert’s nightmare!) with taxi drivers and strangers who ask what happened to my knee. I always think of how awkward it would be if it was caused by something really traumatic or terrible like, “My boyfriend pushed me down the stairs.” Whenever I tell people what happened, they ask if I was drinking. I wasn’t, but what if I was and had a drinking problem? This is probably my social worker brain working overtime, but these things could make it really traumatic and difficult to talk about.

The truth? It was traumatic. It might not sound like a big deal to clumsily fall on the tube in front of lots of people, making a big, embarrassing scene while being in the worst pain imaginable and being in shock. It was extremely traumatic, and even I didn’t know how bad it was at the time or that it’d still affect my life 9 months later. But the good thing – if there’s anything good about this – is that it has forced me to be more outgoing, to open up more and allow myself to be more vulnerable. I still keep a lot to myself. I don’t talk about how I can’t take the tube without having flashbacks and how I think I have some PTSD from it. How many of us would talk about that? We just put our brave faces on and make it look like everything is hunky dory.

Life going well right now? Careful. Life = Jareth the Goblin King

If someone asked if everything really was hunky dory now, I wouldn’t know what to say. Maybe that it’s getting there, but I’m still dealing with stress and uncertainty. I’ve had a lot of people ask what my plan is now that I’ve finally finished my master’s. Will I stay in England? Move back to the US? Go somewhere else? The truth is I don’t know. I never want to be defined or remembered by one thing that happened to me. I can’t deny, though, that my injury has had a significant impact on my life, potentially changing the course of it, not by the injury itself but by the aftermath. Finishing postgrad late and spending money on things I wouldn’t have otherwise (like taxis) has delayed everything. I have received a conditional job offer in England. I’ve kept quiet about it and am still not revealing more details because I’m not sure if it’s going to work out. Getting a visa is extremely difficult, again largely because of the financial issues I wouldn’t have had otherwise that are putting a hold on applying for one, thus putting a hold on the job. I don’t know where I’ll be in 2 months when my current visa expires. Imagine not even knowing what continent you’ll be on in 2 months! I want to settle in England more than anything. I feel more at home here than anywhere else I’ve lived. I got my master’s here to make it easier to transition into a job, and there are no words to describe how gutted I’ll be if my master plan doesn’t work out. Even though I have backup plans, I really don’t want to consider them. Everything is up in the air right now because that’s life. I was having a hard time accepting it, but I have to believe it will work out the way it’s meant to, cliché as it is. Why? I have no other choice. Everything usually does work out at the last minute. Every major move or change of my life has worked out in the nick of time – Chicago, South Korea, England. I don’t regret any of these things, and they all brought me to where I am now and made me who I am today, but it makes me wish things could be easy just once.

This isn’t a ‘poor, pitiful Lindsey’ post. There are few things I despise more than being pitied. I don’t want sympathy; I want understanding that sometimes questions about people’s personal lives or plans can be difficult to answer for a multitude of reasons you don’t know about. We all want empathy and understanding, no matter the situation, but we continue to close ourselves off. We’re so afraid to let people see the real, beautiful, imperfect us, we don’t even give them a chance to show us the empathy and understanding we crave and fear simultaneously.

That’s the point I’m trying to get to in this rambling, jumbled post. Because we’re all a bunch of liars, we don’t see let others see the cards we’ve been dealt or who we really are, so we don’t really know each other. This also means we can easily lose ourselves in the process of creating these false narratives. That’s why I needed to be a little more real in this post. This is about taking off the mask and showing that what you see online or even in person is never the full picture. That’s true of everyone. We all want everyone to think we’re okay all the time, but we’re not, and that’s okay. On social media and in life, we only show the snippets of our lives that we want others to see, but there’s always more beneath the surface. The more you have to show on social media how great your relationship is or other BS, the more it seems like you’re trying to prove to yourself and everyone else that everything is great when that might not be the case. That makes the fall from grace even harder. The more you act like everything’s perfect, the less real you seem. It’s understandable. It can take a lot of courage to be real. That just leaves us to suffer on our own, and we shouldn’t have to do that, especially we’re not alone, and we’re all suffering from something.

I’m not saying we should complain about everything or reveal every detail of our lives. I’m saying that we should not be afraid to let ourselves be real sometimes. We shouldn’t be afraid to be vulnerable or to believe that we are enough exactly as we really are. We shouldn’t feel like we have to prove something all the time. It’s okay to not to be okay sometimes. This mad world is full of ‘not okay’ periods, but it will get better. As they say in my meditations (Calm has been an absolute life saver!), everything is impermanent. ‘Now is not forever at all. Just give it time…’

We can’t expect for things to magically get better or to go it alone, though. Things will only get better if we’re in this together and spread love. One of my absolute favourite musicians/people Andrew McMahon once said:

We live in this culture where everything is supposed to be so hip and so cool, and it’s not cool to love, and it’s not cool to take care of each other, and it’s not cool to stand up for ourselves. But you know what? Fuck all of that. I believe in love, and I believe that the only way that we are going to survive this fucking craziness that’s going on in our world today is if we just learn to look at love, turn our heads the other way from all the bullshit, and fucking love.

If that isn’t true now more than ever, I don’t know what is. We all need to stop worrying about looking cool in our manufactured lives and see ourselves and each other as we really are and just ‘fucking love.’

You don’t forget the people who show genuine love, compassion, understanding, and empathy when you need it most. Life is pretty hard for a lot of people right now. We’re all facing our own unique challenges and uncertainties. That’s all the more reason we need to be compassionate and really be in this together, not against each other or trying to outdo each other. The only way we’ll survive all of the crazy things happening to us and around us is by being together. We all need to feel accepted and understood, like we can be ourselves without the facade. If we all took some time to really see the people around us and understand them, maybe we could all take off our masks, remove all the filters we only think we need, and live happier, fulfilling, truthful lives as our beautiful, imperfect selves.