Handling Hard Times

Sometimes life is just hard. And I think it's important to acknowledge.

We live in a Facebook society--where we share the good news and the trivial bad, but rarely anything of real substance. Don't get me wrong, I love Facebook. I enjoying stalking my friends and family, almost to an absurd degree.

Yet I think this kind of social interaction often does us a disservice. On more than one occasion, I have started typing a new status update, only to second guess myself: "Is this too serious for Facebook?" And many times I have deleted the words before they ever made it into cyberspace. I have instead bottled up the whatever-it-was that was bothering me, or hurting me, or disturbing me, and put on a happy show for Facebook-land.

Most of the time, my life is precisely as it appears on cyberspace. But sometimes, there are other emotions. Sometimes I am stressed, or sad, or anxious, or angry, or discouraged. The kinds of emotions that are far less acceptable to post about on social networks. The emotions that are the most important to process.

I know that I am not alone. I'm not the only person who struggles, and I'm not the only person who bottles emotions inside, for fear of "TMI"-ing everybody. In our world of social networking, blogging, texting, and so forth, we are becoming emotionally handicapped.

But we don't have to pretend all the time. It's okay to talk. It's okay to feel. I'm not suggesting we blab our innermost feelings on Facebook. I am suggesting that when the time is right, we find a sympathetic ear, and let it out. Talk, vent, weep uncontrollably--whatever it takes to process the emotions that need to be expressed. Because life is hard. We deal with real challenges; different ones for each of us. If we spend our lives pretending, for the sake of our cyber-image, that our lives are happy and hunky-dory all the time, we will never actually be happy.

I am happy, most of the time. But when life throws me a curve ball, I want to be able to deal with it, overcome it, and move forward. I don't have to fixate on the hard times, but I don't have to ignore them, either. I own those hard times.