A Way To Get Lost In You

Hands up who uses social media?

Hands up who uses it more frequently than they do anything else in their life?

Any ideas why?

I sum it up to not so much being super convenient providing everyone you want to share the latest with in your life is using it too, but more so a method of escapism.

While it's good in some respects, in others it's downright depressing.

Take the case of any Kardashian, or just celebrities in general. If you look around at what's in your life and think it's not as good as it could be, as soon as someone big and fancy updates about their seemingly uber cool lifestyle, you're hooked!

Even if the image they post isn't terribly exciting, it still somehow ranks more exciting than anything else in your day or life put together.

I've heard many times that most things on social media are about putting your best foot forward, but it's ridiculously easy to get caught up in that. The best foot is really convincing!

I personally avoiding joining Instagram for as long as possible because I didn't want to get caught up in the lives of other people when it seemed almost fake in a way. If you're putting what you want people to see out there, what aren't you showing?

If I'm having a good time then sure I'd love to show it to the world if I feel it's necessary, and I'm sure that many people that do post images of themselves having a good time are completely genuine, but I've just never been a fan of the 'keeping up appearances' thing.

It's like when you feel terrible but you put on a happy face and show that to the world and no one is any the wiser. More than anything, I hate the aftermath of trailing through Instagram and Facebook feeds. Everyone else's life usually seems more exciting than what you're doing, even though in quite a lot of cases, it's really not.

I guess in a way it could be seen as a privacy thing. You don't want people to know what you're really going through so you don't show it or any hints of it.

For me it's a lot more personal. When I read about people who have suffered immensely but show no signs of it so others don't know what they're going through, especially when it's too late, it's devastating. You can't help someone if you don't know that they need help and if they don't ask for it.

I recently started following a few different celebrities that I admire because I like to see what they're up to, obviously. Whenever I read through the photo comments it's more often than not fans begging the person to follow them, heavily sucking up and ultimately expressing their desire for the life depicted in the post. It all seems superficial to me.

At the end of the day I think it's about validation for a lot of people, hence the 'follow for likes, pay for likes, etc' type things that are everywhere. People want attention and for other people to notice what it is they're doing so they can feel like they've done a good job or whatever.

Thanks to the incredible variety of social media platforms, it's that much easier to find a way to get lost in another person's world, their life, their everything. Just make sure you don't lose yourself in the process.

Anyone But Me

Given the heaviness of things that I had to deal with at a young age and the conflicting messages I got from society and my parents, my greatest wish if I couldn't be loved and accepted for who I was, was to be someone else.

The number of times I wrote down or told a counsellor that I wanted to be Hilary Duff or Jessica Alba, someone that people loved, looked up to and respected, I've lost count.

The first time Jessica came to my attention was in Dark Angel which I absolutely loved. The character she played was her own hero. She took care of her own, fought and fended for herself and did so from the tender age of about 9.

Aside from my love of the show, I thought Jessica was really pretty and fit, as most females in Hollywood are meant to be. More importantly, the guy I was crushing on thought she was attractive, so I decided that if I wanted him to like me, I had to be as much like her as possible.

When that didn't seem to be working out for me, I turned a little more close to home.

I started watching Hilary Duff in Lizzie McGuire as many people came to know her well for. She wasn't some trashy celeb, but actually seemed like a wholesome rolemodel to look up to.

I saw a lot of myself as I'm sure most girls did, in the character of Lizzie. But more importantly, I just wanted to be Hilary herself. Her life seemed so glamorous and fun, scores of people lined up just to get a glimpse of her, she had it all and I wanted it.

It was all a method of escapism although I didn't know it at the time.

With the advent of social media it's become that much easier and quicker to become besotted with someone else's life, especially when you're unhappy within yourself and your own.

It doesn't matter how many times people say that everyone is just putting their best foot forward on these various accounts and that's what people are envying, you still want to be part of someone else's life, peer in the windows or get a foot in the door to observe.

I previously wrote a post about my somewhat guilty pleasure of Facebook stalking and how it lead me to cut down my time on Facebook altogether. I didn't trust myself not to keep doing it and eventually my life got more exciting than what I felt like sharing or getting caught up on when I logged on.

I admit that I have moments where I do slip. It's the overwhelming urge to see how the 'other side' is living even if I know what either there won't be anything to see or whatever I do find will make me feel worse about my own life hence why I take a look in the first place. It's cyclical and kinda nasty.

This time though I gave myself some slack. With everything that's going on with my family at the moment, even my therapist and a few of my friends have said that if I feel the need to occasionally divert back to old ways to help me cope with the bigger things that are harder to cope with, that's completely justifiable.

When I was briefly checking out various people's profiles which I guess wouldn't exactly be considered stalking although I felt in my core that it was, only a small part of me was hoping to see something mildly miserable that was fixable so I would know that I'm not the only one going through a tough time, but mostly it was just to not think about my life and things I didn't want to deal with, if only for a brief moment in time.

It's kind of cruel to think that you feel better when you know someone else is going through a tougher time than you are, but I suppose it makes you grateful that your problems aren't that bad, not that it helps any.

There's a quote that I found back in high school or sometime afterwards that says something along the lines of "If everyone in the world put their problems in a pile, you'd want to take yours back". I think Russell Peters also made a joke which was similar saying that in India you go alone the slums and see one person with a problem and they seem to be managing well and say that they don't have it as bad as the next person, and the line keeps going until you get to the person in the worst possible condition and they're still positive because they make the best of their situation and say that it could always get worse.

I can only recall one time in my life so far when I've ever been thrilled beyond belief to be who I was. Just before I turned 25 things were going well for me, I had a great support network around me, I was enjoying uni and my other hobbies, work was working, there was nothing for me to be unhappy about. I think the biggest thing was being tagged in various posts by people I knew on Facebook, it was confirmation that I was important, that I mattered. Nothing could bring me down because I was more okay than I had been in a very long time.

That level of confidence didn't last too long though. When it came time to plan my birthday celebrations which I hadn't had too much time to consider before then, suddenly everything was up in the air. I wanted my friends to be able to come but since my birthday is on Halloween and it's increasing popularity in Australia or at least Sydney, I had to accommodate other people's plans to fit in with what I wanted to do and that got harder and harder.

I ended up having a nice group of friends together which was all that mattered. The people that were most important to me came to spend time with me. We sat around the lounge room and chatted about anything and everything between food and drinks. It was simple and nice.

It's taken a really long time for me to even get to that point. The point where I've stopped concerning myself so much with whether people like me for me, because for most of my life they didn't, but now I know that they do or they wouldn't be in my life. There's no two-facedness about it.

I remember watching That's So Random! late last year and Selena Gomez was performing 'Who Says' with lyrics like 'wouldn't want to be anybody else'. My inner cynic thought, well sure you have a successfully career, you're pretty, popular and dated Justin Beiber, there are countless numbers of people who'd kill to be you.

I think the funny thing is while you're wishing to be someone else because you don't know what's really going on for them, people love you for who you are and others wish they could live your life. It's a crazy thought but it's not entirely untrue.

Sometimes a small part of me wishes I could be someone else, but not for very long. It's usually when I'm having a down moment and struggling to get back up again. I've been fortunate enough to have met and still have people in my life that make me incredibly glad to be no-one else but me. :-)

It's Okay Not To Be Okay

It's tough growing up in general. It's even tougher growing up without a stable family unit.

My mother was diagnosed with mental illness when she was about my age and has had several breakdowns because of it. For most of my teen years I deeply resented my mother for being ill and not being able to be the kind of mother I wanted and needed. I know she did the best job she was capable of doing, but it doesn't ease the pain or burden of having so many of my own needs go by the wayside.

As a teenager I had to be my own mother, sister and even grandmother at times, more so now that I'm older and wiser. I hated coming home with a full head and heart and just wanting to pour it out to my mother like I'd heard other girls talking about doing at school, only my mother wasn't terribly well versed in over comforting words. Any time I was upset about something, she automatically believed that she'd caused it even if there was no connection at all to my problem and her logic. The other times when she knew it wasn't something she'd done, her best advice was just to pray about it.

Looking back on my teen years I once asked myself why I never prayed for mum to get better, to not have an illness and to be the mother I desperately longed for. The only answer I could come up with was: because it was too hard, too big to ask for.

I couldn't comfortably hang around other kids because they got to be kids, I went home and had to be a carer of sorts to my mother who refused to even acknowledge that she had a serious mental illness making that much harder for the rest of the family. She was able to switch modes as it were, from normal wife and mother, to 'mental patient' and only we saw the difference and had to deal with it the best we could even if that often meant not dealing and just trying to find a way to get through each day. Aside from mum's psychiatrist, we never contacted any organisations that specialized in her particular illnesses, it was too hard to admit there was a problem especially since we spent so much time and effort pretending there wasn't.

Mum has always been the centre of the family, not intentionally, more because we've had to go out of our way to make sure she's happy just to avoid any kind of conflict. I think it's the same for everyone who has someone in their family who isn't well, all the attention and focus goes straight to them and everyone else just finds a way to deal with it.

A close friend of mine who was once one of my high school teachers and has always been a second mother to me, shared her experiences dealing with one of her brothers who has the same condition as my mother although much much worse. She told me of some of the things he'd done and how bad things had gotten and that you just have to find a way to cope because there's little else that can be done. She also told me that as hard as it was for her and her family, it was that much harder having a parent with the illness. This person is meant to raise you and teach you how to be a decent human being, instead you kind of have to raise yourself and the other person because they have the attention and need the childlike care that is taken from you. It's not okay, but you find a way to make it so.

The people who put the effort in whether voluntarily or not to care for the person are hardly ever asked if they're okay, perhaps it's because there's no real way to answer it. When people asked me if I was okay back in school and high school days, I'd just nod and smile not entirely sure how to answer the question. I'd then overcompensate by going out of my way to make sure that everything was okay around me for everyone else if only to remove the focus from how not okay me and my life really was.

One of my present close friends has a sibling who is ill in a different way but requires care and she's told me on many occasions how fed up she is with it. She doesn't want to care for him because she's having to put her life on hold and get treated badly by her family because they're afraid to rock the boat with her sibling. At the same time she doesn't want to just leave him high and dry but isn't sure what else to do so spends as much time as possible either working or with her partner. She finds a way to make it okay when it's anything but.

Not too long ago she texted me explaining the headspace she was in and how she was just sick of dealing with her family and everything so took a day for herself which she desperately needed. I texted her back telling her to not be so hard on herself and that she was doing the best she could with what she was dealing with. She texted me back thanking me and telling me that was exactly what she needed to hear.

It's okay not to be okay especially when you know things aren't okay and you don't know how to make them okay. At least you're not alone, and that's okay.