If you're looking for perfection...
You're not going to find it here
The online world is so glittery. It’s full of beautiful images of beautiful people living their beautiful lives and working their beautiful jobs.
Very little of which is real.
Of course there are beautiful moments - we all have those.
But real life is messy; it’s full of mistakes. Real life does not look like a curated Instagram or TikTok account.
The pressure that social media puts on all of us to appear to be perfect is unhealthy in so many ways. But it’s what marketers insist the public wants to see, so a lot of people feel they have to carefully manicure and curate their online lives.
That artificial perfection has all sorts of negative consequences for both creators and their audiences, as my friend (and author of awesome novels) Kara Jorgensen recently wrote.
But more than anything, it’s simply false.
To me, one of the most valuable aspects of the internet is that we can connect with each other and be real across great distances. We can support each other as the beautiful-yet-imperfect beings we truly are.
It’s not healthy, but more important, it’s not honest to insist on being positive and picture-perfect all the time. Helping each other through the clutter and mishmash of real life is so much more vital, maybe even sacred.
So you’ll hear my emotions and my insecurities in my Tarot readings. You’ll see my struggles to “massage” my writing and art projects into the finished shape I want and to fit my creative pursuits in between the less fun but necessary practicalities of life (oh gods, looks like it’s time to do my taxes!).
You’ll also get to share in my joys and my successes. Because those are real, too.
They’re not curated, not Photoshopped, not generated by AI.
That’s what my online space is about: making space for being real. I hope you feel comfortable being real along with me.
Nature works with "good enough" The Antelope only has to be fast enough to escape a leopard, not break the sound barrier. Striving for cheerful mediocrity in most things and being a bit better or worse in others is the lot of most of us. Let's raise a pint glass (or botta bag of retsina wine) to all of us peasants, and share out the picnic.
It feels to me like more and more of us are seeking authenticity rather than curated personas, and that has to be a good thing; here's to being perfectly imperfect, or in other words, human!