Excerpt
MISLED
Facebook misleads us, doesn’t it? With our curated lives, partial images of what’s going on. My own feed shows me at the Pink Martini concert dancing to China Forbes singing “Brazil.” And riding my red Cannondale CAAD 10 on the Deschutes River Trail (note the fine components on my bike and my amazing cycling kit). And at Spork eating an appropriately sized, gluten-free, cruelty-free, low-carb lunch with five of my close friends.
That’s why I started this experiment. Could I show you the full picture? Could I bare my soul that way? Tell you that the bike shorts are a size larger than last year. Disclose that the concert made me nostalgic for a night eighteen years ago when my ex-wife and I first bought Sympathique and blasted it through our Optimus bookshelf speakers and out into our backyard with the newly-finished cobblestone patio replete with black wrought iron furniture. That I remember that night and the gin and tonic with such longing for what was so good about that time and place and relationship.
Things were easier, or so I thought. People dropped by and parties happened spontaneously—great big Barefoot Contessa–type meals on that patio. And my ex-wife and I talked well into the night about things that felt so important—feel so important—books, news, the future, the garden.
On the Deschutes River bike ride, though, my friend Lesbiana Profundis and I talked about our former marriages and how what we think we really miss is the idea of what we thought our marriages were. In other words, we miss the story that we told ourselves about our relationships. Because the reality is, I drank way too much during that entire marriage. The reasons why are myriad, but the fact remains, during those Barefoot Contessa meals, I had a big buzz on. But in the picture of may marriage I remembered during the Pink Martini concert, that’s conveniently Photoshopped out.
Everything is both/and. You either embrace it or you hate it. Sometimes you do both. We live in the great mess, the humus, or soil, of life—which has for its root, the same prefix as human. It comes from the Latin homo (not that homo, that’s Greek), which means to be born of the earth. Life should be dirty, tumbling around in all the organic components that make up our lives, our living, ashes to ashes, and all that beautiful fertileness that makes us who we are. We should not Photoshop it out just so we look a little happier, a little skinnier, and like we had one less gin and tonic. Take a breath and embrace the duality, and remember, it’s okay if your bike shorts are a size larger than last year.