I recently had a very challenging situation in my life where I felt like a tire in the mud. The communication with someone in my life was circular and no matter what I tried, we could not meet in the middle with our understanding. It wasn’t until I had an epiphany and bared my soul that it felt like we made progress.
I have a hard time being completely honest with people about myself. I rarely let anyone in, deep enough to really understand who I am and why I am. Most often, it’s because most people just won’t get it and will compare me to what society thinks is normal. So what do I do? I hide my reality and become an active participant in societal norms.
Out in the world, life is amazing, I have a smile on my face and I’m walking on sunshine. But when me and everyone else around me, wears a facade, it’s so easy to feel alone and misunderstood. I used to look at my thousands of Facebook “friends” and I would see so much perfection and happiness and I couldn’t help but think to myself, where did I go wrong? why isn’t my life so grand? Or I would see someone post about God and blessings or prayer requests and wonder why my relationship with God isn’t that great.
I get so inspired when I see people shedding their facade and showing the world some reality. I am not there yet for myself but I have started with revealing some of my reality here in my blog. I’ve written that I’m giving up Facebook. I can not stand the fact that people are falsely competing for who has the best life. The reality of most the people on Facebook is they need people to see their good and never their bad; most don’t attend church services or speak to God on a regular. They are just like me: Trying to stay afloat in this rose-colored world.
I recently went through a transition at work where we are now working in an Agile style. My team is encouraged to be empowered and what they call “T” shaped. What it all comes down to is we are a team of Developers, QA analysts, Business Analysts and Business owner, who are in charge of how we get work done. We are given a set of work and we decide as a team how to get it done in the timeframe that we have. If someone is falling behind, we help them along. We celebrate our wins and we look for opportunities to be better. When we became a team, we were strangers and had no reason to be advocates for each other but our interactions lit a spark and now we are like family. We are open with each other and we have mutual understanding.
This transition just further made me realize that it is our human nature to be empathetic and personally invested in others. No one person can normalize reality alone because we have to shatter societal norms together.
Life is not a competition. Life should be a team sport where there’s only one team.
Look Within 