Capturing Katelyn: Is the blog real?

The post I put up this morning left me thinking.  Does this blog really represent me as a person and how I am feeling at any particular time?  

This morning my friend Kristen and I started a conversation about people who write sad or emo-esque messages on Facebook and Twitter.  I admitted to her that I am often tempted to write “woe is me” messages on Facebook when I am feeling down or struggling to stay positive.  Just last night, I was having a particularly rough night working late, struggling to fight off the urge to binge eat, and feeling down in general about life and dating.  The question I was asking myself and was tempted to post to my friends on Facebook was, “When does it get easier??”  But I resisted, as I often do, and did not put this “downer” and complaining thought out into the universe.  For the blog, and on Facebook and Twitter, as much as possible, I choose to only share positivity.

HOWEVER, I am not always feeling positive and not always a beaming life of happy energy (shocking, right?)  So, does that make my Facebook News Feed and my blog an inaccurate display of who I am?  And does that matter? Kristen asked me if there was a reason why I chose to only share the positive sides of myself online and as I struggled to put an answer into words, I also got a message from one of my college roommates, Kim.

Kim let me know she had just seen my blog entry on Tulipfest, thought I looked really great and that the outfit I posted was really cute.  I thanked her, obviously, but then, as she is one of my best friends, I felt the need to give her some background on the "real story" behind that outfit.  The "real story" is that I, in fact, actually had a mini breakdown on Saturday about that outfit.  

The outfit was a little bit of a risk in terms of being outside of the norm [read: shorter and tighter!] of what I normally wear.  It was also a bit of a risk for me to even do an “outfit photo” on my blog.  The reason I even had that photo on my phone was because sent it to a couple friends asking their opinions on the outfit before leaving the house (one of the downfalls of living alone is not having anyone for outfit advice – thank you digital communications!!)  As I mentioned earlier, I have been struggling a bit lately to maintain my weight and I haven’t been feeling extremely confident lately with my appearance.

After taking and looking at a particular picture of myself on Saturday (NOT posted), I started to feel extremely self-conscious of how I looked.  I actually had a mini breakdown, partially due to other reasons that I’m not comfortable sharing here, but partially due to feeling really uncomfortable and silly that I had attempted to wear this outfit out in public!  

My friends from college and I have always joked with one another about having “body dysmorphic disorder” and not having realistic images of what we look like.  I felt like I had had a BDD moment when getting dressed that morning and accidentally worn something that someone of my size should NOT have been wearing.  We’ve all seen people out in public (often at Wal-Mart) and thought to ourselves, “Wow, that person should NOT be wearing that!” and that is exactly how I imagined everyone must have been thinking about me.  And I ended up changing into the emergency pair of jeans I had brought with me to the BBQ.

Yet anybody who say my post from this morning wouldn't know any of that and would have just thought that I was happy and confident in my outfit choice.  So these questions have been rolling around in my head all day.  Should people know that I ended up getting self conscious and changing my clothes?  Why did I post something that didn’t tell the whole story?  What is the underlying reason why I make these decisions to hold back my own emo-esque thoughts and posts? Does telling this “whole story” matter?

I realized through writing this post and thinking about these things that part of it comes from a disconnect with the person I want to be and the person I am.  In continuing with what has been a very honest blog post so far, I will go ahead and say, I am not an extremely confident person.  I doubt and second guess myself all time.  But I WANT to be a person who puts together great outfits, blogs them and feels confident with themself.  I want to be someone who is happy-go-lucky and has an always-positive attitude.  I guess the reason why I choose not to post my negative thoughts or feelings or not "tell the whole story" is because in the virtual world, I am trying to project an image of the person I am trying to be in the real world.  It isn't necessarily being dishonest, it is painting a picture of who I am at times, and who I want to be all the time.

That being said, I am going to make an effort to be more honest on my blog.  I think that in itself can be very therapeutic.  In fact, I feel a lot better having written this post.  See people?  This is why I LOVE writing!  And if you've made it this far in the entry, let me just say, thanks for reading :)

Happy Tuesday, hope you're all having a great week.