I Know This Girl . . .

It's funny, how creative we can be with our identities.

I know a girl, a lovely girl, not someone who reads this blog, but someone who writes her own. She is ambitious and motivated and smart.

She's also fiercely protective and frightened and insecure.

Because I know this girl in "real life," I can recognize the lies that she tells herself and others in her postings on her blog. I can see the way she stretches reality, expanding insignificant events and ignoring hurtful ones. I can watch her create a smug persona that her audience eagerly embraces and idolizes.

My house, as always, is spotless because I'm neurotic about germs, she wrote, on the day that I stopped over and saw that there were toys and leaves and dirty paper plates scattered across the carpet.

There is nothing as important or as valuable to me as my friendships, she wrote, in the middle of the month where she did not acknowledge any of the phone calls, emails, or gifts sent from the group of women with whom we socialized.

I have a virtual rain forest in my kitchen, she wrote, when her plants were all dead. My style is eclectic and vivid and bold, she wrote, when all of her clothes were black and the walls in her house were beige. I whip up my all of my sons' clothes from scratch, she wrote, even though I knew her to be constantly tucking the Osh Kosh tags of their sweatshirts.

Did I mention that she gets a zillion comments a day? By people who want to be "just like" her? By people who refer to her as their "hero?"

When this girl writes about her wonderful relationship with her father, I know that he lives a mile from her house but never makes an effort to see her kids, his grandchildren. When this girl talks about her perfect marriage, I know that she is on the brink of divorce, that her husband overspends and overindulges, that she spends most of the nights while she is "creating," waiting for his headlights to appear in the driveway.

I know that this girl, who writes about being overbusy and overstressed, spends the majority of her time in bed, sleeping her life away. I know that she is overwelmed by her high-energy sons, whom she describes as "perfect." I know that she often sits in the corner of her living room and cries.

I will admit that when I first discovered this girl's blog, I was fascinated by the discrepancy between the person that she portrayed and the person that she was. I also resented it because it was full of lies or half truths, and people believed her. Mabye I was jealous, too; maybe I wished that I could create an identity based on the person I wished to be.

But then, I started blogging myself and realized just how easy it was to present yourself in a certain light, to be the person in the J Crew ad or the Pottery Barn house, if that's what you were after. What wasn't possible in real life was certainly possible in cyberspace, where the friends you make are ones that you're unlikely to meet. I can't blame someone for "pretending" to have the life that they covet, if that's their way of coping with their reality.

I'm not that type of person, though I've often wanted to be. I'd like to be able to rewrite the parts of my life that I don't like and believe the story I've told. I'd like to be the independent, spirited woman I saw on House Hunters last night, who had bought a bar in Costa Rica and was planning to acquire a house there, too. I'd like to be someone with a passel of brothers and sisters who congregate at grandma's colonial on the North Shore of Chicago every holiday. I'd like to be a mother who hasn't wiped her children's noses with the sleeve of her sweatshirt or a wife who greets her husband in the evening with a five course dinner and a toned body clad in lingerie.

But I can't. It's not that I don't have the imagination; that's just not me. And that's not the reason I blog. I don't want to make connections based on lies. One of the reasons I like blogging is that it comes the opportunity to meet people from all over the world who have the same sense of humor, passions, convictions and/or insecurities as you. People who say: That was a funny story, or Something like that happened to me, too.

People who read your stuff and say, I get it.

I get you.

How bittersweet that would be if the story that they connected with was untrue. If the part of me that they enjoyed wasn't real.

So I went back to reading this girl's blog and, instead of judgement, I started to develop some compassion. Because I can't even imagine possessing a spirit diligent enough to blog each day, yet feeling the need to tarnish that ambition with evasiveness and dishonesty. While I realize that we all hold something back and hide things, even from ourselves, I can't imagine the kind of defensiveness that this girl must feel, the insecurity of believing that if people knew the truth--that she was poor and in a shitty marriage and had a self-centered dad--they wouldn't like her.

Because, deep down, her blog is not mean-spirited or arrogant.

Deep down, it's sad.

There are a lot of things that I think we should be creative with. If you want to make a Fruit-Loop encrusted personal shrine, I say, have at it. If you want to alter advertisements so that your face appears next to Mel Gibson's on the billboard for The Passion of the Christ, go right ahead.

But I can't be afraid to be myself.

In the end, it's all I really have.

And from my perch, where I observe and I analyze and I write, I think that all of this girl's "fans," the ones who have put her on that pedestal, would love her as much, if not more, for knowing the truth, than they ever would for knowing the plastic, Frankenstein image she has sewn up for their pleasure.

And for the ones who wouldn't?

Who needs them, anyway?