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Editor’s Note: Juliet, our regular Monday blogger is off today. Instead, we offer you the first of many posts from guest blogger, Andrea Levendusky. This post was originally featured on The Organic Bird Blog.
We are connected as much as we let ourselves be.
If I wanted to, I could tell you everything I’m doing all day long.
You could hear the music I’m listening to.
See the places I’m seeing.
Photos of the food I’m eating, the clothes I’m wearing, the sky above me.
The beauty of connecting with others is one of the joys in social media, in my opinion. I love knowing what my sister had for breakfast, what my best friend is wearing today, what my other friend’s husband is doing for work these days. I like seeing the world through your eyes on Instagram, or hearing your soundtrack on Spotify.
But the illusion of being completely and totally connected falls short when I’m sitting on a couch next to a friend, and my heart is racing before even a single word comes out of my mouth. I’m convinced they can hear every heart beat in the silence of the room.
I say things like,
“I’m sorry I can’t make eye contact with you. I don’t know why, but I can’t right now.”
etsy
See, when it comes down to it, I want you to know things about me.
Just the things I can control.
I want you to see into my heart,
so long as it’s a scheduled tour and you leave as soon as I turn out the lights.
I want to know that when I say something that makes me scared to death,
maybe you’ll comment on it or give me a thumbs up.
Not the real life, heart-beating loud, silence is thick and heavy knowing. That terrifies me.
In the real life, my voice is shaking, I-don’t-know-if-we’ll-make-it-through-this moments well, those moments are rare
sacred.
I don’t take it for granted that we all get to glimpse pieces of life within each other on Facebook or Twitter. I know real things exist behind these black and white words, color and photographs.
But when I have a friend thousands of miles away, open up her bleeding heart on a chat conversation, my eyes fill with tears, because I realize all of this is real.
Life is not a job, I saw someone post recently.
Nor is it a status update.
Or a blog.
Or a Friday night hangout.
Life is what we do when we choose to open up to each other, expose the things we have no answers for, ask questions out loud that we’re afraid we might not want to hear the answers to.
weheartit
So whether real or proverbial, when I look into your eyes and something goes from Facebook-worthy to voice-shaking worthy, I see it. I see you.
