Here I stand…. or sit depending on which picture you are currently looking at.
My hair is done, my make up; perfect, even my clothes are freshly pressed. I look like a girl who really has her shit together, and most days I feel like one too.
But there are other days in my life, days which are not so picture perfect. Days where I feel like I’m spiralling, which way is up and which is down. I lose all sense of my usually positive bearings. One thing after another, the world throws it’s punches and with every blow it gets harder and harder to get back up.
It is just a bad day, I tell myself over and over.
But I am human.
These days are real but yet it is as if unless I scream from the top of my lungs “I AM HAVING A TOUGH TIME, PLEASE LET ME BE!” I couldn’t possibly be experiencing it.
When you follow someone online, whether they’re a celebrity, a blogger or someone who went viral on the world wide web. You feel like you know them, heck I feel it too, like every time Chloe Morello tweets its like we’re BFF’s but she just doesn’t know it yet.
But they are still just a person, they wake up in the morning and wipe the sleep from their eyes just like us. They scream and swear when they stub their toe on the chair leg that definitely wasn’t there 2 minutes ago just like us and they also have days when they just don’t feel like themselves. Just. Like. Us.
I recently experienced an instance where someone forgot that even I was human.
“I felt like I had been kicked in the chest.”
After a long 12 hour day in London, I returned home and sat at my computer to play catch up. I opened up my Youtube and there was a comment from someone claiming to have seen me and that I was as stuck up as they had imagined.
I felt like I had been kicked in the chest.
They hadn’t even spoken to me, they hadn’t given me a chance and yet they had hung drawn and quartered me within in a few split seconds. That day had been surprisingly good so I couldn’t understand how they had jumped to that conclusion.
Assumption. As my dad says, it really is the mother of all F*** ups.
It is so easy to think you know everything about a person purely because of the 5% of their life that they choose to share with you.
“Oh she’s smiling in that picture so she must always be happy!”
“He is living the dream therefore his life must be absolutely perfect.”
How easy it is to assume that because we don’t always see the hardships, that there simply are none. And what a truly heartless assumption to make!
I talk about this all from the perspective of someone with over half a million people following their journey, but in reality this applies to everyone in every walk of life. Kate working in Topshop, David at the local Supermarket and Charlotte, the Youtuber with a million subs. None of us know anything about what they are currently dealing with. Life might be throwing punches we have absolutely no idea about and you just might happen to cross their path in the midst of it all.
Their demeanour may not be what you are used to, what you hoped for and it is all so easy to allow that brief exchange to impact and tarnish this person.
Did you ask that person if everything was OK? Did they mean to react that way? Did they want to talk about it? If you did, you are a rare breed of person known as the “Empathetic Type”. If you didn’t, you didn’t give them a chance and you are just as guilty as you perceive them to be.
There’s a saying which is always knocking about on peoples Instagram accounts which reads
“Everyone you meet is fighting a battle you know nothing about. Be Kind, Always.”
Absolutely everyone goes through difficult or hard times at some point in their lives, even you. And if you happen to cross paths with someone and they aren’t on their A game, then I would say that 9 times out of 10 this is their reality. People are seldom “bitches” for no reason what so ever, they are rarely rude or unapproachable just for the sake of it so it pays to open your mind, see the bigger picture and stop thinking about yourself and how YOU feel in that very moment.
There needs to be more compassion, understanding and empathy for each other in the world and online; less judgement, less witch hunts and down right negativity. Sure, you don’t have to like everyone, I sure as hell don’t. But that doesn’t mean you have to try to destroy the person because of it, because in all honesty, the person you truly destroy in the process…is yourself.
Top – H&M similar here
Shorts – H&M similar here
Shoes – Chanel
Bag – Bulgari
Sunglasses – Dior
Bandana – ASOS
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