The shirt to the left was a gift from my best friends from college, who gave it to me at the wedding shower they threw for me and The Husband last year.  (His shirt-gift was a little less family-friendly so will not be pictured here.  But it was awesome.)  These friends of mine–who have known me across fifteen years, one thousand-mile moves (mine), babies (theirs), and the self-growth that (hopefully) accompanies the movement from teens to twenties to thirties–are one of life’s refuges for me.  With them I do not have to pretend to be something I’m not: warm and fuzzy, proper and decorous, respectful of etiquette.  Instead, I can be the girl who puts this shirt on every two weeks, armed with sponges, spray cleaner, a Swiffer, and a bad attitude.  I can alternately dance and stomp around my house while my favorite classical channel plays in the background and simultaneously bless our ample square footage and curse the mess that builds up in it. I can walk about my life bra-less and bleach-stained and altogether inappropriate, knowing that even with all my flaws, there are people out there who are still willing to celebrate me.

That, my friends, is grace with flesh on it.

And then there’s the alternative.  The soul-eating, heart-exhausting business of keeping up appearances.  Switched.com recently posted an article called “Facebook Makes Us All Sad Because Everyone Is Happy But Us.”  Crux of the matter:  most people stick to posting only the positive aspects of their lives on social networking sites, to the point that we don’t really know each other as we’re represented online because that is not the real us.

I’m just as guilty as the next guy of telling the FB community about my great run or sharing a picture of the awesome dinner I just made.  But as a dear friend recently told me, “Facebook is bullshit,” and, let’s be honest, it is.  What better forum to reinvent ourselves and not be held accountable?  Negative comments can be erased with a click!  We can be whomever we want to be!  Too bad we spend so much time wanting to be perfect.  Haven’t we all learned by now that we’re not?

We human beings live suspended between the infinite sadness of living in a broken world and the infinite joy of knowing there is hope beyond brokenness. (If you, in fact, believe that.  And most of us do.  Mine happens to have a name.)  When we make perfection (or the appearance of it) our hope–and dear God, how I have over the years–we shortchange ourselves of the community engendered by comparing battle scars, of the company to be found in admitting weakness.

There is not much life to be discovered when we start being polite and stop being real.

I don’t know about you, but if there’s one person I don’t trust, one character I will not be inviting to my dinner party, it’s the asshat who types incessantly about his/her flawless kids, wife/husband, job, life.  THERE IS NO SUCH THING!  Can’t we all just drop that act and admit that life is this world is both glorious and defeating, invigorating and exhausting, shiny and covered in grass stains?  Can’t we drop the mask and be ourselves, warts and all, instead of using mass communication as a means to market our fake selves?  Whose approval are we working so hard to attain?

For my part, I’ve learned that my struggle-ridden posts generate much higher readership and many more comments that those singing with joy.  And while we should be free to share our happiness and not fear that we will consequently be left sitting by ourselves in the lunchroom, abandoned by friends who only operate by a “misery loves company” mentality, I sense that the showboating is much more widespread and detrimental than the my day sucked posts are.  We suspended humans can surely find a way to function in the realm of honesty that lies between despair and delusion.

So, in that spirit, here you go: this morning I went on a run, and it totally blew.  The air was frigid, and I felt like puking the whole time.  And on days like this, the end is the only good part of the run.  But the end, even when it comes sooner than I’d like, has home and warmth and coffee waiting.  And that is huge.

That’s what she said.