It seems that my most recent post discussing my marriage has created a buzz, since Sunday I have heard from a few real life friends who felt that I either went too far by putting the Spousal Unit on blast or the flipside has been a few of my girls who told me they are in the same place and never felt like they could talk about the issues I brought up.
I won’t lie, truth is I was very hesitant to publish that post yet at the same time, there was a real need to say what I did and not necessarily to just one or two folks. In the past couple of years, I have watched several good friends get divorced and in all cases the divorces even the “nice” ones are still messy. I have been divorced and its not a pleasant thing, families fracture, kids get bounced around and the list goes on.
No, when I remarried years ago, I knew it was important to marry someone I could always be honest with since truth be told had I written what I wrote about the Spousal Unit about my ex-husband, there is a chance that well, it would not have been good and I will leave it at that.
Yet in the age of the internet, are there times when one can reveal too much information about themselves online? The answer is yes, but at the same time I think that while so many of us stay connected 24/7, I think the sad reality is that most of that “connection” is superfical. We are living in a time and space, where we can facebook, twitter, and use a vast array of tools to tell folks how we are doing, yet let’s be real who states in their facebook update “I am facing a moral dilemma”? I have yet to see that and I suppose if I did, most folks who would reply would do so in a cute and superficial way.
Nope, we do a lot of talking these days and sometimes reveal way too much about ourselves but at the same time we don’t reveal our true selves…instead we reduce ourselves down to cute and digestable soundbytes. I will be honest, I am at a stage in my life where I am all about being real and honest and recognizing that my quest to be real and honest may at times cause folks to go WTF???
There is something about getting older and seeing society shift from a place where we talk a ton but say nothing that has me wanting to get deeper, I neither want nor need to be nice or stay only on the surface. I think about how in recent months as our nation faces the worse economic crisis in years, we hear about tortured souls who decide to take their lives rather than face economic uncertainty. After these folks kill themselves and in some cases their families, inevitably we hear that they were nice folks…no one saw it coming. Of course not, no one wakes up and says today is a good day to kill myself, after coffee and an Egg McMuffin, I think I will finish it off with a taste of bullet to the head.
Nope, these folks are often stewing and brewing for a while yet for many of us we no longer are able to connect in a meaningful way that might prevent such tragedies from happening in the first place.
So while I do think there is a line we can cross as far as going too far when it comes to revealing ourselves in a public space at the same time by dropping our masks we can create opportunties to connect with others in a meaningful way.