They say a picture is worth a thousand words,
but what exactly are those words? What’s the worth of something that’s carefully curated, filtered, and posed?
I can tell you. I’m a recovering pretend-post addict, after all.
Our most recent family photos were met with many words of praise:
“Your children are so beautiful.”
“You have a gorgeous family.”
And the most gutting, “You are perfect.”
No one could’ve known I was reading those comments with a pit in my throat, probably from my bed, the place I refused to leave even for meals. It would’ve been impossible to predict that behind closed doors I had spent the last few years fighting to save that very same “perfect” family.
You see, a picture is only worth the story behind it - and no one knew mine. I was a wife, mother, and friend to the outside world. I smiled on cue, dressed my kids in matching pajamas, and alphabetized my spice rack.
What people saw is what I projected: a life tied up in a nice little bow.
But here’s what was really going on behind our white picket fence. The portrait no one could predict:
I am a child who survived sexual abuse. I am a little girl from a small town who used her colorful imagination as an escape into the world of reading and writing. I am a teenager who survived statutory rape, and a young woman who hopped from relationship to relationship, loving everyone except herself.
I had a stalker, a professor who propositioned me, and cancer, twice.
In my mid-twenties I married a steady and safe man and settled well into suburban life. We tried to start a family and had two miscarriages, followed by two healthy babies who would later both be diagnosed with autism.
When my son was six weeks old, I found my husband unresponsive on our bedroom floor. Unbeknownst to us at the time, he had an extremely rare, incurable, genetic heart condition, meaning both of our young children had a 50% chance of inheritance.
Anxiety and depression have cycled through my veins my entire life, but as I entered my thirties, they raged with vengeance (right along with low self-esteem and body image issues).
There’s a lot of beauty sprinkled in there too, but chances are, that was already public knowledge. It was shame that kept all of the other parts of my story hidden for far too long.
So why can I share all of that now? Well, it’s because of that perfect photo.
The day my daughter was diagnosed with autism,
I opened a private Instagram account. I didn’t want friends or followers; my husband didn’t even know about it. I just needed a space to be my most authentic self.
For two years, within the confines of those safe little squares, I wrote solely to myself. It was cathartic and life changing and challenged me, for the very first time, to grieve and begin to live again.
So when I posted our family photos on my public page, and the comments poured in about my “perfect” family, instead of filling me with admiration as it would’ve in the past, it felt icky. Because I now knew what it was like to be fully seen and accepted—mainly and most importantly—by myself.
So I did something rather unorthodox and made that private journal public.
If you’re reading this now, you are the first recipient of my full truth.
We all have a private versus public image and that’s okay. There are things we show the outside world and there are things we keep close. But the problem becomes when there’s no overlap. When you lead such a duplicitous life that you start saying (or posting) things you don’t even mean, feel, or believe. That may get you a million likes, but in my experience, humans require much more than that.
At our core, we all want connection.
And there’s just no way to get that through perfectly filtered photos and carefully worded posts.
Not all stories need to be told on such a grand scale. But if there’s a private image you want to make public, do it. Share it on a page, share it on a stage. Share it with a therapist or a trusted confidant. It doesn’t matter. It’s only important to give your most authentic self a place to be seen.
And when you do so, not only will your island of isolation shrink, the picture of your life will be worth way more than a thousand words.