...I haven't slept a wink
I used to listen to the Beatles' song "I'm so tired" on repeat when I was up with Ben (3-7 times a night) for the first two years of his life. It was oddly comforting.
I go through periods in my life where I experience fairly extreme fatigue. In fact, I don't think I've felt "well-rested" since before Y2K. Now is one of those periods. I've been so exhausted lately, it's hard to keep my eyes open even while I'm walking, and it takes real effort not to fall asleep in the middle of conversations. Hence why I missed a blog post last week, and have been MIA on Instagram.
Being this tired has me musing about how it can be so easy, particularly on Social Media, to pretend like life is really glamorous, and that we're all really successful and happy and awesome all of the time. Well, I just want to be honest with you all and say that, just like every other human on the planet, life is not always easy or glamorous in my experience. It's hard, messy, complicated, weird, beautiful, fierce, and delicate, all at once, and I don't always feel successful or happy even. It's a white-flag-waving kind of week (or month or whatever), the kind that makes you say "Enough! Enough!" and maybe cry a little (and maybe eat too much chocolate, I dunno, you do you), and so it's time to just be real.
So, with that in mind, here I am. Life is not glamorous or easy, and I'm not feeling particularly successful right in this moment. I'm breaking out, I'm exhausted, my health is not amazing at the present time, and I feel vulnerable and on edge.
Life isn't a perfect 280 characters on Twitter, it's not an amazingly curated snapshot on Instagram, it's not a well-liked post on Facebook; It just is what it is, and the best thing, I think, we can do for one another, besides the basics like being kind, not murdering people, and disavowing racists and nazis, is to be honest when things are hard instead of always feeling the need to pretend they're perfect. They're not perfect. I'm letting you off the hook, blog readers. My life isn't perfect, yours isn't either, and it's totally okay to be honest about that.
Go forth, my friends, and let someone else off the hook today by being real, and imperfect. I bet they need it.
--Sam