Dear Rita,
it took me a while but I think I finally understand what you say. Of course, we are talking a whole lower scale here: I am not an international movie star from the 40's (thanks, google!). I am just a simple guy with around 5000 followers on Instagram. But I, on my own way, feel like Gilda and Rita.
I have a social media persona, who, like every social media persona - or every persona - is not real. It is me in the pictures and the pictures are real, but it is all one dimensional and isolated from reality. I choose what I want to share and how people will see that persona. I have active control of how that persona should live in my follower's minds. And I am starting to feel like that is coming back to bite me in the ass. The same ass I post there.
People look at it and assume I am this great guy: a world traveler who is always surrounded by the most amazing and the hottest friends, who has a perfect husband, no insecurities and who is an absolute sex god. And although these things can be true here and there, I am not that guy all the time. I am someone normal. I am someone who will order McDonald's and binge watch Netflix beside a snoring husband whenever I am home on a Friday evening. Someone who does not have lots of friends, who finds his job boring and lonely at times, who owes money to his credit cards and, most importantly, someone who has insecurities like everyone else.
And this is not part of the fantasy, this is not something other people will see. People want the entertainment, people want Gilda. Behind the phone screen, I am just Rita. And more and more I am noticing that, after they get to know the real me, they go away. Their investment does not pay off, so they just leave. When people set off to get to know me, they expect to be sucked into my fantastic perfect and happy world, and not to be shown problems like their own. Inevitably I will disappoint them for starting with the bar so high.
One would argument that I am better off without those people, that at least they are showing their true colours now better than later, when they are sentimentally involved in my life, and that it is their loss. And I agree to all these point - rationally speaking, they all make perfect sense. Unfortunately a friend that waled away from me once taught me that we are not entirely rational, and that the emotional bit means a lot. At the end of the day, no matter how much "better" I am for being myself and for not having those people in my life, I am still the one who's walked away from. I am still alone.
Usually this is the part of the text where I write something hopeful, that will make the future look brighter. And the future will be brighter, it has to be. I cannot give up, I have to keep trying until it works. Rationally speaking, I know that the wheel turns, and if now it looks grim and sad, it is just the bottom of the spin, but soon I will start going up again.
But right now the emotional is being stronger. Right now I just want a hug. Or maybe I wish you could come back from the dead to tell me that none of that matters. In 70 years, you'll be dead and someone will be talking about you in a blog no one will read.
