Filtered Reality

Someone said something to me the other day that gave me serious pause.

“I really wish I could be you!”

I know it was meant to be a compliment of sorts – that for whatever reason this girl thinks my life is so glamorous and easy that she wants it as her own. Instead it left me with a furrowed brow and sense of uneasiness.

This comment boggled my mind because I have spent the past few months wishing I could be anyone but myself. Despite trying to put my best foot forward when in public, I often trip and fall on my face when in private. The vision of confidence and happiness that I want others to see is not always what my insides are lined with and a lot of the time my exterior is in complete contrast with my interior. We live in a world where image and competition are being forced to the forefront of our priorities. This desire to appear “picture perfect” becomes an all-consuming necessity. However, sometimes if you look more closely at this picture, you will see that the lines are blurred and that the ink is faded to the point of colorless.We can’t believe everything that we see.

“You walk around like a snob.”

My mother said this to me one day as we exited Chipotle and I stared at her wide-eyed in disbelief. I have always taken pride in my appearance (sometimes to the point of vanity) and try to walk around with a sense of confidence, but according to my mother, I was coming across like an egomaniac. I am often reserved and will usually keep to myself, but this stems from a place of uncertainty rather than one of superiority. I’ll never start a conversation but rather will wait for others to approach me, not because I think I’m above making the first move, but because I’m too afraid to do so. I’ve posted a stream of bathroom selfies showcasing crop tops and long red nails, but this is the same bathroom where I have spent countless hours scrutinizing every inch of my appearance. Guys I have dated have mentioned how much they love my confidence but they don’t know that I spent the majority of these relationships feeling like I needed to look and act perfect in order to maintain their interest. I will “#tbt” to an old modeling picture, but won’t post how little I ate that same day because I thought I was fat. The fabric of my life wouldn’t be so beautiful if it was turned inside-out.

“You get asked out more than anyone I know!”

I’ve heard this from at least half of my friends. Yes, I have the tendency to attract very forward, confident and sometimes arrogant (this is not a good thing) men, however none of this has equated to the “happily ever after” so many of us seek. I have often tried to explain to the friends who envy my dating life that I would trade all of it in to avoid some of the experiences I have had, but for the most part this falls upon deaf ears. Attention doesn’t make someone immune to heartbreak and while I’ve had my fair share of compliments I have had my fair share of hurt too. A few years ago I went to a warehouse party in Brooklyn with a guy I was dating – our relationship was on its way out but we were foolishly attempting to resuscitate it. That night, as the boy I loved became a stranger, guys lined up to try to buy me a drink to the point where another girl took notice and remarked to her friend “she thinks she’s so great, doesn’t she?” To this random girl it appeared like I was having a great time and why wouldn’t it? I spent the night forcing laughter and dancing in a pink spandex American Apparel dress, surrounded by endless company – I was a vision of happiness. However, inside I knew that my relationship was ending and so I felt more lonely and insecure than ever. While it appeared that I would be going to go to bed that night wrapped up in my own ego, the reality of it is that I cried myself to sleep.

We no longer apply filters only to our photos, but to our entire lives – painting our friendships, relationships and even our self-image as something impossibly perfect without flaws or mishaps. We highlight the positive and cast shadows on the negative so that all that is left is what we want others to see. Yet sometimes it is still difficult to sleep at night because while we have mastered the exterior, the interior is falling apart at the seams. We can’t cast the Valencia filter on our minds and hearts, on our thoughts and feelings, and at the end of the day this is really what we are left with.

I have friends get into fights with boyfriends only to post a couple selfie ten minutes later with #love and #myoneandonly in the captions. I know guys who post endless photos of themselves with their girlfriends – meeting the parents, kissing on vacation, going out to dinner on Valentine’s day – only to check my phone and see that these same guys have texted me asking if I want to meet up. The only life whose truth we know is our own, and that is the life we should be focusing on.

On the reverse side, rather than tailoring our own lives to be the envy of everyone’s conversations and social media streams, we need to focus on what we see in ourselves and how it makes us feel. Who cares if a selfie gets 100 likes if the person who took it looks in the mirror and criticizes what they see? Who cares if a relationship gets deemed #couplegoals if one half of that couple is cheating and hurting the other half? We should seek to be authentic in our feelings and experiences – to be the best version of ourselves that we can be.

I Will Never Get Over This

“I will never get over this.”

When people were ripped from my life, when my heart was broken, when my dream job slipped through my fingers – I sat before my mother, my brother, my friends, and with tear-filled eyes exclaimed:

“I will never get over this!”

Deep pain is void of foresight; the only tense it knows is the present. We, its victims, forget past times when we persevered through struggle and are blind to the possibility of a happier future. The pain overwhelms the body, flooding our eyes and wrenching our guts. It isolates us–no one can understand our pain because no one who has felt this way could have survived it.

The first time I experienced my emotional mortality was when my grandmother passed away. She was more than the woman who gave me cookies and spoiled me when my mother wasn’t around, she was someone I saw almost every day for most of my childhood. She was a second mother to me, which was reflected in the name I called her, “nĂ«nĂ«,” which means “mother” in Albanian.

Up until her final second on earth I believed she wouldn’t leave me. Even as the machines surrounding her hospital bedside cried out with grief and the faces of my family members grew hollow, I remained in a comforting sense of denial. It wasn’t until my cousin squeezed my hand, confirming my inevitable heartache, that I even allowed myself to cry. As the tears fell, I felt a pang in my chest and an etching scrape across my heart which read:

“I will never get over this.”

These words ached in me for a long time, weighing on me heavily in the sort of way that slows breathing – that slows living. However, as time went on, the pain began to dull in a way I could not have predicted. It changed not because I missed my grandmother any less, or because she was any less important to me, but because time gave me perspective. As the pages of the calendar turned, I was able to think of my grandmother outside of my grief at her loss. My beautiful memories of moments we shared came forward. My bitterness dissipated and was replaced by gratitude for the long love-filled life she lived, and for how many people I love are alive and well.                                                                                             

When my heart was broken for the first time, it felt like I stepped into emotional quicksand. I didn’t know how to pull myself out of my hurt because I didn’t think it was possible. I found myself sinking deeper and deeper into helplessness. I slept to avoid thoughts and feelings but they were always there in the morning to greet me with the sunrise. I was desperate for the pain to dissolve, and begged those around me to share stories of their first heartbreaks: How did you cope? Did it get better? How long did it take?

I sought an expiration date for my pain, but nobody could provide one because everyone is different and all of our pains are unique. Not that it would have mattered anyway – I ignored everything that anyone said to me about how my life would go on. When people pulled out the time heals all wounds card, I rolled my eyes and buried the clichĂ© under piles of sand. They were prescribing a placebo, an empty sugar pill to trick me into feeling better. Maybe that worked for some people, but I was immune to time…

Or so I thought.

I woke up one day to find optimism greeting me with the sunrise. I discovered that my heartbreak had expired, and it was time to throw it out and make room for the happiness I was now able to feel.

Pain doesn’t last forever.

Read that again.

Pain does not last forever.

Thoughts that once had me bedridden, no longer make me even bat an eye. Things once too painful to speak of, are now stories that I openly share.  I found healing catharsis in opening up about my pain. The support of family and friends, setting new goals to work towards, and shifting focus from the sadness of the past to the good in the present can all help to speed up the healing power of time.

And for the pain that can’t ever be fully erased – for the pain that once stabbed me so brutally that the scar can never fully heal – maybe the mark will always remain, but the  skin underneath the scar is thicker. Pain helped me grow stronger. It forced me to confront new obstacles and over time, pushed me to overcome them.

Time helps us discover new ways of thinking and feeling, and  allows for new opportunities at happiness.

I have learned that pain is not quicksand, it is the sand in the hourglass. It needs time to run out, but when it does, happiness will inevitably be found again.  

Best Friends For (N)ever

The concept of everlasting friendship is one that is ingrained in many of us from a young age. We are taught how to make friendship bracelets, and encouraged to purchase halves of lockets to couple with our best friends’ other halves. We casually throw around the acronyms BFF and BFFL on a daily basis. But what happens when a friendship doesn’t stand the test of time? What happens when the friend you grew up with transforms into some you don’t like or even recognize?

At the age of twenty-five I already have many friendships that have lasted over a decade or two. My friendships have survived butterfly clips and tie-dye shirts, side bangs and Lisa Frank, different schools and even different states. I have watched friends graduate, fall in love, land first jobs and move into first apartments. Unfortunately I have also watched some friends seriously disappoint me.

 

I once had a friend that I described as a “soul sister.” She and I went everywhere and did everything together, we laughed at the same jokes, thought the same things, even liked all of the same foods – I truly believed that I had found someone to share my locket half with. Then, three years into our friendship, my friend came to me and bragged about betraying another friend – she had hooked up with a guy her friend had dated and still had feelings for behind the friend’s back.  What upset me the most was not what my friend had done, but her lack of remorse for her actions. Instead of feeling guilt, she felt proud and gloated for twenty minutes as she sat on the foot of my bed telling me what had happened. She looked like a stranger to me. After that night our jokes didn’t seem as funny, our thoughts not as aligned, and our favorite vanilla milkshake didn’t taste as sweet.

In another instance it was a friend of eleven years – she was the first friend I made in high school. We talked until 4am nightly, wrote each other emails and letters when on vacations, visited one another at college and had regular sleepovers in the summertime. However, as the years went by and my friend entered into a serious relationship, our friendship stagnated. The talks became weekly, the sleepovers obsolete. I didn’t complain when she cancelled plans or even when she missed my birthday, but when for the first time in eleven years I asked her for a favor, to be there for me for something that was serious and important, she bailed because she was “too tired.” I knew then that I would never again eat breakfast on the kitchen counter of her Brooklyn apartment.

We often want to believe that the same people our friends are when they have braces, are the same people they will be when they have grey hair. That we know them better than anyone so they can’t surprise us, change on us or hurt us. But sometimes in life people change and grow apart, sometimes we see people in new circumstances and situations that display their shadows in an entirely different light.

This isn’t to say that a friendship should be abandoned the second one friend makes a mistake or has a slip-up. No one is perfect and part of caring about someone is accepting her flaws and enduring the tough times together. Although sometimes it’s worth weathering a storm for the sake of a friendship, you maintain the right to evacuate yourself from a hurricane. It’s about weighing what is acceptable for you and what isn’t. I was okay with my friend missing out on phone calls and my birthday, but I wasn’t okay with her bailing on me the one time that I really needed her.

We can feel beholden to a friendship because of its longevity, but there is no point in staying loyal to something or someone that will bring us more sadness and hurt than joy. I was hesitant to end my friendships – how do you throw away 3 and 11 years of memories and laughs? But I wasn’t willing to invest even more time in people I knew would disappoint me, in people I could no longer look at the same way. My mom always told me “if you have one good friend in your life, that’s more than enough,” and so I’d rather spend my time and energy on the good friendships that I have, on the people that are there for me and support me, than on people who will let me down.