Writer’s Block
Lately I’ve found myself in the midst of a pretty convoluted case of writer’s block. Much like anything else we do in life, we oftentimes will find a moment in time where the sights we had set on initially becomes hazy and questionable. It’s moments like these where we are forced to nurture the seed that motivates us or find a new source of fulfillment.
Now I would be kidding only myself if I sat here and told you all that my life hadn’t been turned upside down recently and that for a while my life’s most gracious challenge was making it out of bed and into my car to start the day.
We as humans, find it so easy to admire the lives of the people we follow, rather than trying to be the leaders of our own lives. With the arthritic trend of our millennial generation ensued upon us to with the double tapping to like and the emphasis put on not even the quality of a comment, but at the mere quantity of people with something to say that mattered.
So at what point did the lives of our peers become the manual to how we live ours?
A following in social media can be great in a cognizable circumstance where their platform is used to uplift more people than just themselves, but how often is this the case?
When we live in a world where less of what you do matters and more of how many people saw you do it does, you have lost sight of your own entelechy and are now looking for it in others in search of the same thing.
So instead of your profile telling the story of your life, it is masqueraded with the visions of what others would rather see instead. We post the things we think will perpetuate attention, popularity, and infamy. Rather than us checking each avenue of digital approval for status updates from your sick relative or trouble peer, we see the focus of photos shift to that of comparison and envy. If our photo didn’t reap sufficient results, we redirect to a drawing board that is filled with “options” of who to be, some more authentic than others, yet we still choose to post what will continue to create the illusion that all of us have our sh*t together, when in actuality, we are barely holding onto a thread.
So how do we maintain our own sense of identity without asphyxiating all chances of social acceptance?
Understandably, we want to keep to ourselves, the aspects of our lives that are most real, because that sense of raw vulnerability is terrifying, but at what point do we enter into the world of selfishness where our filtered lives have set the precedence for others to feel the same about theirs. When in reality, you could both be mirroring each other’s daily heartaches and are only amplifying this by denying your “following” a glimpse into life as a human. It’s as if we have reason to apologize for being what others would deem as normal.
