Today I woke up and scraped the remaining makeup off my face from the day before. It was the holiday costume party for my part-time job, and I wore a full-face of makeup for the first time in...who knows how long. I did my hair. I wore the tights with the waist sincher. Everything short of heels.
When I'd finished perfecting my look before I headed to the party, I paused in the mirror, recalling how different I look with eyeliner and eyeshadow and mascara and any pesky zit covered slyly with concealer -- made up, to be sure. See, a few years ago, I found liberation from makeup; from the need to daily change my face to how I thought the world would better accept it. Years before, in high school, I discovered my natural hair was more than acceptable and that hours of my life had been wasted every week making it what I thought it should be.
In a second of giving myself the final look over, my altered look reminded me of something I'd been pondering already. A week or two ago, I was doing something - I don't even recall what - and I was straining to try to capture a picture with my ailing phone, in bad light, when I caught myself. Why am I doing this? WHAT am I doing? A pillar of the way I try to live my life has always been being genuine; I struggle with anything that requires me to do something I feel is contrived. And as I wiggled and bent and shifted to try to get the perfect shot I thought, this isn't what I'm about, yet somehow it's become second-nature. The joke in society is, "If you didn't instagram it, did it even happen?"
I don't do things in life for the sake of my instagram or facebook audience; I don't do them for the sake of someone else's approval of the picturesque parts of my life. I don't do things in life for any other reason than to experience it. I miss when taking photos of something was simply to memorialize it and capture its wonder or significance, not just to impress people with carefully created snippets of our lives.
So I've been taking pause and asking myself - and only myself - to be honest, why am I doing this? There are hundreds of people who have unbridled access to the curated version of my life, yet they don't know me. That's something to think about. How can I live true to myself in the hyper-filtered age of Instagram? How do I live life with a blind eye to the measuring stick that is Pinterest? Do my passions have any purpose if not exposed in a rant to whoever has yet to unfollow me on Facebook? Is this a wise or valuable use of my time?
I want to strive to have these questions, this pause be the only filter for my choices and my actions. I want to live to be who I aspire to be, not just appear to be who I think the world wants me to be. I want to go back to living life just for the experience of it.
