Leading a Triple Life
I lead a strange and interesting life, that’s to be certain. I’ve found the most frustrating thing about it recently is living my life on different levels.
1. I have a personal life, which at one point, I felt as though I was the only one who could see it. I then realized that it was valuable to be able to trust people with that aspect of my life from time to time.
2. I have a life which others perceive. While I have little control how others see me, I still attempt to manage the way others see me as much as I possibly can. There are circumstances where this is not the case; typically dependent on how well I know the people around me. I’ll throw some inhibitions out the window if I’m completely comfortable.
Now, it’s the first two that I don’t mind. It’s the first two that I have dealt with for most of my life. That’s not to say I haven’t struggled, but I think many of the difficult parts I found have found a recurrence in this third part of my life. I can’t say I hate it, if I did I’d abandon it, I’ve just found it complicated recently. And that is:
3. I have an online life. Yes, including this. When I speak of this, though, I’m mainly talking about the ‘online status’ part of my life. I’m hyper-sensitive to how I portray myself online. I don’t lie online, but I do choose to omit some private parts of my life. For many they’ll edit out their typical social interactions. I haven’t ever done that, not really. What I’m talking about is the general status messages about how I’m doing. At one point, I had horrible food poisoning, and made it sound quite mild saying on twitter that my stomach was upset. I think this a good indication, at least in that physical way, what I mean.
Inherently, I don’t have a problem with omitting things. I don’t think it’s necessary for all of my ‘friends’ on Facebook, or those who follow me on Twitter to know how I’m doing all of the time, they don’t need to know if I’m having one hell of a crappy week, but I think it’s important for friends to know. Those whom I love, they want to know. I want to know when my friends are lousy, if only to support them. But what happens when the main way I stay in touch with friends to keep up on how their doing is syphoned through these methods? Some friendships warrant it, others don’t, that I understand. But those that do? What happens? They don’t get the dirt. They see my life through a filter. A filter put in place by some, but not for all.
For me, this has become one of the most important reasons to push interpersonal interaction outside of the new technology that we see. Maybe it’s completely selfish because I’m not willing to announce to the world when I’m not doing well, but I would like those who are closest to me… I’d like them to know, at least from time to time that things just plain suck.