I feel like everything is such a performance now. Like you have to be on all the time, even when you’re supposedly just being yourself.

You have to look put together so people take you seriously, but then if you look too put together, people think you’re fake. Everyone says they want real people. They want honesty. They want someone they can relate to.

But then someone is actually honest and it’s like, okay, that was a little too much.

And I’m like, what do you actually want?

Because sometimes I think people want fake imperfect people. People with minor problems. The kind of problems you can admit to and everyone laughs and says, “Same.” Nothing that makes anyone uncomfortable or changes their opinion of you.

You can be a mess, but you still have to be doing well enough that nobody has to worry about it.

Even being vulnerable feels like something you’re supposed to be good at now. You have to know what happened, why it happened, and what you learned from it. You’re supposed to explain your feelings in a way that makes sense to everyone else.

But what if I’m still in the middle of it? What if I don’t have some beautiful thing to say about it yet? Maybe I’m sad and being weird about it. Maybe I want something really badly and I’m embarrassed by how much I want it. Maybe I know better and still don’t know how to do better.

I don’t think that should make everything else about a person less believable. You can have goals and still feel lost. You can care about your life and have days where you don’t know what the fuck you’re doing. I don’t understand why we act like being taken seriously requires pretending that doesn’t happen.

And I know I care how people see me too. Even writing this, I’m thinking about how it sounds. I want to be honest, but I also want people to understand what I mean. I don’t want one feeling I share on one day to become the whole idea somebody has of me.

So I get why people edit themselves. There’s a reason we do it.

I just wonder how much we end up keeping to ourselves because we’re afraid of being seen before we’ve figured everything out.

That’s part of why I want this space. Somewhere I can talk about feelings and goals and dreams and all the shit that comes with trying to have a life. And I want to be able to come back a week later and feel differently without acting like the first thing wasn’t true when I wrote it.

I don’t have a neat ending for this. I’ve just been thinking about how exhausting it is to want to be known and still feel like you have to watch how much of yourself you let people see.

I’d like to feel a little less watched by myself, at least here.