What you are looking at is not an aerial view of the Grand Canyon.
This is a picture of my face, specifically the region right around my eyes; one that explodes into a maze of a million swirling lines every time that I smile.
It’s a museum of sorts; the collected artifacts of 45 years’ worth of late-night gatherings with friends, silly moments with family, of messages to students, of inside jokes with my wife, of road trips and funny stories and great movies, and of being… happy.
Which makes it all the more troubling that it’s a place I so often hide from people.
As you get older, you begin to have those moments of surprise; of being caught off-guard by your own physical metamorphosis. It may come in the form of a friend’s Facebook photo of you, or your passing reflection in a store window, or in the brutally honest comment of an obliviously non-self aware toddler, who doesn’t realize how close to his demise he is.
Years ago on youth camping trip, I can remember trying to remove a sleep crease from my face two mornings in a row, only to finally realize that it wasn’t anything I slept on… This was simply my face.
They weren’t sleep creases, I discovered, they were simply me creases.
The least vain of us all struggles to reconcile the mirror from time to time. We all face our changing waistlines, and hairlines, and frown lines, and we try to make peace with the fact that we are ever becoming the after, in the before-and-after photo of our physical selves.
We try to make peace with it, all the while simultaneously waging war with it.
It’s always been difficult for people to age; to face the attrition of our bodies, but it’s never been as difficult as it is today. Thanks to social media we have two distinct, seductive, powerful, often destructive elements in our lives…
In our profile pages, we have personal perception-management machines; individual public relations organizations, where we can deliver a perpetual stream of flattering content, designed to promote the lives that we want people to believe we are living.
It’s a place where can spin our story.
And just as dangerous, in our News Feeds and Friends Lists, we have the continual, insidious nudge of Comparison; that ever-present reminder that our teeth may not be white enough, our kids may not be cute enough, or our houses may not be big enough.
It’s the place where that story never quite measures-up.
As a result, we’ve grown ever more comfortable filtering our lives for the world; more and more used to editing out the messiness and glossing over the wrinkles; of capturing, manipulating, and packaging our appearance, our marriages, our kids, and our careers, in an effort to fool people (if not ourselves), in to believing that we are ageless, worry-less, flawless wonders.
It’s not just about how we look that we obsess over now, but how we’re looked at; about how respected and liked and admired we feel.
I don’t know about you, but I’m exhausted.
I’m tired of sharing a spruced-up, touched-up, sanitized version of my life; weary of playing the relentless game of Perfection, with people who I supposedly consider friends.
Yes, those lines on my face bother me, and yeah, they’re only gonna get wider, and deeper, and they’re gonna multiply; but those lines are the path of my life etched into my body. They’re tangible tracks, that remind me of the joy and grief and laughter and tension that have marked me forever.
I’m proud of that path, and of those lines. I’ve earned them.
There’s no need to gloss-over your road, friend. It’s the one you’ve traveled. It’s the fully-lit, naked truth of who you are; with the complex mix of the attractive and the horrific, with the rounded smoothness and the jagged shards, with the glorious mountaintop triumphs and the tear-streaked, valley failures.
Whether it’s about your appearance, or your family, or your dreams, or your past, or any other part of you that you share with the world, I’m praying that come to relish the unpolished, unedited, unfiltered beauty in it all.
Hoping you learn to live with, and love the lines.
#NoFilter.
