Stop trying to impress others. Brace yourself, future eye roll coming in hot in 5-4-3-2-1!
Have you ever had the experience of Past You popping back up to mock the hell out of Current You by showing you, in your very own handwriting, just what a complete and utter tool bag you were?
Well, I ran across some of my old journals the other day. Winner, winner, OMFG hammer, screwdriver, wrench dinner.
It took only about three pages into one of these tomes to realize that Current Me would have kicked Past Me in the shins and told her to stop being such a fucking loser. To say these old journals were drawn out, dramatic, wrought pieces of angsty, adolescent garage would be an insult to every pile of pits, snits, and zits held together all over Planet Earth in individual, translucent Clearisil casings. Truly, there isn’t an eye roll meme slo-mo’ed enough to encapsulate the horror that I wrote — in cursive, mind you — held within these pages.
But, that’s not the worst part. The worst part is that this torrent of emotive drivel wasn’t for me. It was performative. I was writing it for someone else. (Cursive, FFS!)
Writing has always been my therapy. It’s the place where I work out my feelings, where I get clarity on my opinions, where I determine where I stand. And, it’s no #humblebrag to say that I’m damned good at it.
But where I suck — where we all suck — is when we do the thing we love in a performative way, hoping for the cookie, the gold star, the pat on the back from others. My journals were overstuffed with just that type of writing, the kind of emotional vomit begging to be seen and reacted to by someone special and specific, as if it would impel them to finally, at long last, give me the blue ribbon I so desperately longed to pin to my chest.
Yesterday’s journals are today’s social media.
It’s time to stop using social media to impress others.
Far too often, we give votes in our lives to people who shouldn’t even have voices. Sometimes these are people who care for us, who express concerns out of love or who have trouble seeing the promise and potential of our joyful dreams through their own anxiety-clouded lenses. Sometimes these are people who have less benevolent ambitions, who keep score, who judge their own rise only in comparison to our fall. And, more often than not, these are people who aren’t even paying any attention at all.
My favorite Eleanor Roosevelt quote — and really, it’s like picking your favorite child, there are just so many good ones — is this: “You wouldn’t worry so much about what others think of you if you realized how seldom they do.“
And yet, we twist ourselves into knots — in cursive, no less — for all of them, counting their likes and their comments and their shares as if the blue ribbon is waiting just around the corner. But it’s not. And Future You is going to see right through it with the wisdom and perspective that time gifts us all and — when you least expect it — walk right up to you and hand you a pair of pliers and cackle her ass off.
And, you’ll deserve it, too.
Because you are performing for others rather than producing what’s truly in your heart and your head.
Because you are concerned more about the opinions that others hold of you than the opinion you hold of yourself.
Because you aren’t being you. Just like I wasn’t being me.
Sometimes I think I should burn these horrible journals. Sometimes I think I should force myself to read every last word as to sear into my brain the lesson that performative anything is useless. I don’t know what I’ll end up doing.
But what I do know is this: the world needs you to be you, even if it’s in cursive.
