I Am So Full of Shit...
So I was looking in the bathroom mirror yesterday and this struck me...
“Um, you are using AI to enhance your photos on your blog...your blog about being authentic...what the actual fuck?”
I immediately thought I was an asshole for thinking it and then an even bigger asshole for doing it!
But I sat with it all day, allowed it to tumble and work its way through my mind.
Here is the thought tumble...
Yep, totally inauthentic.
But I don’t want to stop using AI because I like the way I look when it rounds out all my lesser defects.
But perhaps I should consider stopping using it and only posting photos that are real of me and my life.
Well, that seems terrifying.
But you are advertising a version of you that doesn’t really exist.
But isn’t everyone else?
Yes, but you are not everyone else.
Then I fell into existential dread...
What is going to happen to all of us when our online presence no longer matches our physical appearance. It is like the whole world is agreeing to catfish each other forever...
Do I want to be a part of that?
Can I not be a part of that?
What is so wrong with me the way I am?
Why do I still feel the need to compete with 20 year olds for looks and body image?
What the fuck is going to happen to us as people if we keep going like this?
Are we not engaging in behavior that we dress up the online version so much that we then have to do all sorts of shit offline to make the two images of ourselves maybe even a little congruent? Or are we content, am I content, to forever showing up in my real skin and having people be disappointed and feel like I bait and switched them?
I think we all want to seem better than we are. I mean, I know I do. I want to seem younger, more vibrant, healthier. You know, all the shit, all the time. Why, why is it so hard for me to just love the skin I am in without all the graphic enhancement?
Well just having had plastic surgery is probably a pretty good indicator of where I am...
Is this a midlife crisis?
If not, what the fuck is it?
If so, where does it end?
Do I get a whole new face like Madonna?
Do I just keep carving myself up and out in order to fit some other person's beauty standard?
I see a world coming where we spend our time behind screens, with these avatars that are not really us. And engage, less and less in the actual physical world. And this makes me want to smash all the mirrors in my house and never get on the internet again!
How can I feel two totally opposite things so completely? How can I post the shit that I do and have plastic surgery and also write from the heart every single day and share my most intimate and vulnerable thoughts and feelings? How are these two things congruent? Are they a reaction to each other? Does one cause the other? Does my perfectionism want me to create the best version of myself and project it online even if that doesn’t closely resemble what is really here and living this life?
It was kind of a fucked up moment at the mirror.
And its effects have been lasting.
And I don’t have an answer.
The insecure, attention seeking hunger that drives me to post AI created images of myself holds me in a tight grip and at the very same time, I kind of hate myself for it.
I want to vow to stop...but at least right now...I can’t seem to find the willingness. But I can feel it mounting. I can feel the disgust with my incongruous behavior mounting. Be me, that is all. Except is it?
I hate a hypocrite. But I am one anyway.
Where I find myself today is just laughing at myself and all my stupid inauthenticity. Nodding my head at those of you who have likely been thinking this about me the whole time...well, you are right. I am inauthentic. And I just fucking saw it...how is that for spiritual development? Aren’t we almost always the last to know?
I am, apparently...
Again, still...
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