Erin E and Sammy D don’t front when they talk about their personal AWKWARD experiences.
Each day we struggle with comfortably being ourselves. At times, we can’t go with the flow because we are so caught up in defining a sense of [unattainable] perfection in the moment. We have AWKWARD encounters and situations, and we worry about our bodies, our friends, our family, our bank accounts and hell, even just our shitty shoe collection.
Like you may have found yourselves feeling before, we can be surrounded by so much goodness and positive energy, that we get lost in the overwhelming emotions and forget to revel in the moment of it all. Instead of finding joy in the now, we find stress in seeking joy of the future. We worry it will disappear, and we wonder if we could [and should] have more of it now.
You see the smiles, you hear the success and you admire the person – but you don’t know that below the front are the same insecurities, stress and faults that you too feel – you just don’t know it, because you don’t ask, and we, as the female gender, [unfortunately] don’t always tell.
What AWKWARD hopes to encourage is the “tell,” the share, the release of those emotions so that real girls like you can see that happiness and security aren’t always what they’re cracked up to be, that perfection isn’t what it seems and in many cases, not only boring – but soul battering, too.
Six weeks ago this Sunday, I moved to New York City. The day after graduation, I visited 5 sublets in one day, gave one of them a $500 down deposit and prayed on the bus ride home that all would be well and my check wouldn’t disappear in the oblivion of sublet scams.
All was well. I spent three glorious weeks at home in rural Pennsylvania, anxiously preparing for the job of a lifetime – a brand new position in social media at Hearst Digital Media, a top publishing company who had hired me a week before graduation. I was a success story – I was the over-accomplished college journalism star who everyone knew would get to New York immediately and go far in her career. I’d been hearing it from all around since I was a freshman, and I had spent four years reaching to fulfill everyone’s goals for me.
Except, that was the problem – I was fulfilling the expectations of everyone else, and not my own. Should I have avoided the job search? Taken that cross country road trip? Should I have spent time at home with my family, relishing in my “last summer” before countless years of summer vacation-less summers?
Three months ago, I sat crying in the living room of my Philadelphia apartment, sobbing to a friend that I just “couldn’t take it.” The success was great, but the pressure was God awful – it was only March, and I was already getting the “So where are you working” question. God damn people, can’t I just relax for like, a second in my life?
Happiness may be our envy in others, but it is also the envy in ourselves. It is that AWKWARD feeling of never feeling “good enough,” even though what we don’t [because we can’t] see is the full circle of it all – the fact that our envy in others is their envy is us. We want their lives, and they want ours. Neither admits their true emotions in the presence of the other, and this silence will pressure each to strive for perfection in a hell thinly veiled as a utopia. We believe our pursuit of perfection is our escape, but it only keeps us trapped in the hamster wheel of self-driven conflict.
Be AWKWARD today. Tell someone how you really feel – we can’t promise it won’t hurt, but we can promise it won’t be perfect. Because perfection is stagnant, perfection is the red tape to our inner peace, and most importantly, perfection is boring.
*Posted by Sammy D
