My online life, like most people’s, is an edited version of reality. Not in a conscious attempt to make myself appear in a certain way, but because some stories aren’t mine to tell and I generally don’t use social media as therapy. I feel like in a world where everything is the BEST and WORST and you WON’T BELIEVE WHAT HAPPENS NEXT, people who don’t rend their garments and wail are perceived as not feeling as deeply. In a world where I like to divide people into Elinors and Mariannes — as in the Dashwood sisters in Jane Austen’s Sense and Sensibility — I am an Elinor. In a world … uh oh. I recently saw Lake Bell’s movie In a World and now I can’t stop using that phrase.
The Facebook year is the year I can present publicly, and it hits the highs fairly accurately and blunts the lows fairly consistently. I like to post pictures from my travels, and I love to travel, and I had a good travel year. I didn’t take a lot of pictures of me on a couch trying to anesthetize my brain after a hard day, or trying to write my feelings out … unless the focal point is the inevitable cat curled on my lap. Only my hesitation of appearing like a crazy cat lady prevents me from posting more of those.
But looking back, it was an interesting year, in those highs and lows. I was in Russia for 6 weeks, Chicago to visit a friend and fall in love with Chagall, at 2 NASA Social events to hear from smart people doing cool things. I haven’t posted yet about Galapagos and mainland Ecuador, or the NASA Social for the Orion launch, or Christmas in Maui, because the rapid fire succession of trips have left me scrambling on the reentry to reality. But here’s to a 2015 full of more highs, more adventures, and an abundance of love and kindness for all of us.