Facebook Is A big Fat Liar (and so am I)

Not feeling well today. You don’t want to hear that, I know, we never do and yet we ask “to be polite”. Just another example of why I am a crazy bitch. No one tells the truth.

 Oh, we make jokes that reveal a little of what we feel about each other –a kind of passive-aggressive truth-telling but if confronted we retract our joke, insist it was just that –a joke and do what we can to sooth the savage ego.

Recently I was on the receiving end of one of these non-funny jokes. I was telling a “friend” about how much I was loving writing this blog. Her reply –telling in so many ways –was that of course I did, it was about my favorite subject –me. Ha ha ha. I laughed along pretending not to be hurt. Was she wrong? Nope. I have always liked my own company and have tried not to bore myself. I live by the saying “if you’re bored it’s because you’re boring”.  I’ve been depressed, angry, manic, crazed, lustful, hurtful, painful but not often bored. Boredom is a waste of good angst.

At 60 I have decided that my goal from now until I shuffle off my mortal coil is to tell my truth. Not THE truth –just MY truth. I’m not sure I have the necessary insights, or even the right, to try and tell someone else’s truth so I’m stuck with writing about me. If that makes me a narcissistic, ego-manic when then I guess that’s the first truth revealed.

This blog is about what has made me crazy and what has helped me cope with it. Telling –and hearing- the truth –has been my greatest coping mechanism. It replaces the one I was taught all my life- to lie.

I grew up in a nice, middle-class suburb full of trees, kids, Moms who stayed home and Dad’s who brought home the bacon. That idyllic time everyone waxes nostalgic about. However, it was all a lie. At least inside my modest 3 bedroom, 2 bath tract house with a nice backyard. My mother hated staying home with the kids. She hated kids. How do I know this is the truth? She finally told my sister and I after our kids were born. She decided to burst the bubble that Granny was going to dote on her grandkids. She didn’t need to tell me but it was nice to have my childhood reality confirmed.

But we could not talk about our sadness in those days. Apparently my elementary school principal told my parents he felt I should see a psychiatrist. God forbid! Family secrets might spill from my 10 year old lips. Horror! Paradise exposed.

 I believe he told them this after I had slapped my 5^th grade math teacher, Mrs. Adamske. To be fair, she slapped me first. To be really fair, I had a mouth on me. I was the straw that broke that poor teacher’s back. Mrs. Adamske took “early retirement” and I was told to stop talking about it.  I like to think that in that very honest exchange between that teacher and myself we had freed her from a job she obviously hated and wasn’t very suited for.  But my call for help went unanswered. Apparently more outrageous behavior had to happen before someone took steps.

How do children get their needs met? Everyone has a way. I learned at that age that it was no use trying to get them met at home so I turned to outside sources; school, acting, men, food, achievement. And in most cases, I was acting a role off-stage. I stayed in relationships that hurt or bored me, I lived for the applause from strangers and I ate and lost the same 50 pounds over and over. I started with the DNA for manic-depression but the expression of my disease took flight through my desperate search for recognition. For love. For someone to tell me I was all right just as I am. No change necessary.

Think about it –did anyone of us hear that really? Do we now? How many parents praise their kids for getting C’s without the addendum “but I know you are capable of so much more.” My friend constantly calls her honors student from a highly prestigious college “lazy” because she doesn’t pick up after herself. She’s not lazy –no way –she is disinterested in cleaning. It’s not her priority. I’m sure when she has no clothes to wear, when she begins to gross herself out, she cleans.

Why can’t we just be? Why can’t I like writing this blog without the label? No one has to read it if they don’t want.   Why is the act of self-expression suspect? Arghhhhhhhhh. So I’m selfish. We all are. That’s MY truth. In my next blog I plan to really piss you all off by explaining why we are all students of Machiavelli.

And now Facebook has made lying an international pastime –never let them see you sweat. Or hurt. Or honest. Don’t you feel compelled to “put on your happy face’ on those pages? God forbid people know you’re struggling, you’ve lost your job or house or spouse. Why, they might pity you. What a loser. Or maybe, just maybe, they will feel a little less alone in their despair. Thank God, I’m not the only one.

Telling the truth and hearing it has begun healing me and therefore I’m not as crazy as I could be.