Today, the daily devotional we read during home school included poem about presenting a positive demeanor to the world and not bogging people down with our personal woes and health concerns. Tell God how good you feel, and God will make it so, was essentially the closing prayer.

This afternoon, after a week-plus break from social media, I hopped back on IG. One of the first posts in my neglected feed was a slideshow about white people’s toxic tendency of pretending everything is OK all the time. According to the infographic, this prevents Black people from being open about their reality and makes it hard for them to trust white people or feel safe around them. White privilege allows us – encourages us? –  to pretend things are OK even when they aren’t.

It made me think about the recent post about my health.

This is a big deal – the decline in my mental and physical health over the past couple of years and especially the past couple of months has put a real dent in my quality of life and creativity. Yet I felt weird about sharing about it here. It’s personal, and it’s on the internet now. I probably present publicly as a healthy, high-functioning person, so when I talk about falling apart, even *I* sometimes feel like, Is that the world’s tiniest violin playing? Can you hear it?

Presented with these two very different perspectives on the same day made me stop and think about it yet again.

I’ve always hated small talk and the emotional labor of pretending things were OK when they weren’t, but there’s a fine line between being real with other people about your struggles and dumping your emotional load onto their backs.

There has also long been a toxic thread through Christianity that doesn’t acknowledge the pain of being human. If you aren’t experiencing joy, this line of thinking goes, you aren’t praying hard enough.

I’m an optimist, but a deeply melancholic one. I wouldn’t characterize any part of my life after early childhood as happy. Leave me to my feelings when I am sad, frustrated, anxious, or upset. Please don’t say that my faith is failing me along with my good spirits in moments when things are low. It won’t last forever. It can’t.

What do those two perspectives mean to you? Do you feel pressured to be falsely upbeat with certain friends? Have you learned to hold space for people when they allow themselves to be vulnerable with you?

My gut reaction is to lurch into more comfortable territory rather than bear the awkwardness of that kind of openness. I can feel my inner self cringing even as I’m steering the conversation back into “safer” waters.

Do you prevent friends from going deep by remaining in the conversational shallows, or by reverting to small talk when someone brings up a tough or touchy subject? How do you decide who to be real with? Does this relate to your interactions with people of color and making space for others to speak truth about their life experience?

Radiate joy even when it’s not your inner truth in hopes of divine healing of body and spirit. Be real with people to build trust and hopefully, let them know they can be real with you, too. Is there a strategic balance between the two approaches?

Image Source: Frans Hals, The Laughing Cavalier. 1624. Photographed from a book of art from the Dutch Masters. This man doesn’t take himself too seriously. I get the impression he gets as much of a kick out of his mustache as I do. I don’t drink, but I’d totally have a beer with this guy.

A note on our devotional, which was published in 1910. It is explicitly optimistic, and  social norms around mental health have changed. When we encounter a reflection like the one we read today, we use it an opportunity to do some critical thinking to see what values can be gleaned when the message feels outdated.

A final note: Each day, the Chaplain comes home to find me the consistency of scrambled eggs. He doesn’t ask me to defend myself, but my internal monitor always requires that I explain. I didn’t wake up like this, the perfectionist little girl inside of me says earnestly. All these things happened! It wore me down, chipped off the shiny exterior until I became what you see here.

I had a quiet moment this evening. I finally stopped editing and revising verbal arguments for my ongoing presentation, Reasons For Lying On the Sofa All Evening and Not Doing Anything Unless Things Get Desperate.

I heard my inner self ask, “How many people rely on you as their primary emotional support person?” I answered, “Eight.” And my inner self gave me a compassionate, knowing nod.