Snapshots

Image credit: Photo by LarimdaME on Flickr Licensed under Creative Commons

This week a woman I knew in high school shared snapshots of her family at Halloween; she and her husband and a few other couples had gathered to take the kids out trick-or-treating. The adults were all smiling, dressed in matching thematic costumes, and the children were adorably wide-eyed, grinning with the manic excitement of impending candy. They posed together inside tastefully decorated McMansions and on wide, green manicured lawns. Like the taste and scent of Proust's chamomile tea and a Madeleine cookie that evokes a vivid memory of Aunt Léonie's house on a Sunday morning, these pictures sent me reeling to some half-remembered place.

At one point, this woman and I had a crush on the same guy, and I spent a good deal of time in my teen years mentally comparing myself to her: putting both our attributes in neat little stacks and seeing who won. I liked to tell myself I was winning. Or even if I wasn't winning in some areas right then, I would be someday: some future day when I was that wildly successful adult I was certainly destined to be, when I would blossom like those nerdy girls in the after school specials always did, when I would somehow magically morph from Velma into Daphne. And also I would be driving a Ferrari. And it would be red.

So, yesterday, when snapshots of her family at Halloween hit my inbox, I found myself among those neat little stacks that somehow ended (in my girlish imagination) with her living out some normal life, while I rode off into the sunset, hair flying, in a red Ferrari with our old high school crush. And I found myself comparing our lives as they had played out, rather than how I thought they would.

Of course, the high school crush rode off into the sunset long ago without either of us, and neither of us ended up (as far as I know) in a red Ferrari (those don't tend to be great for transporting kids), but what struck me about looking at her was how orderly and well, normal, her life really did seem. And how that didn't seem like such a bad thing, because, by comparison, my life looked strange and isolated and insane: with my secret blog and my debts and my disorganized house and my surprising new expertise on things ranging from addiction recovery to occupational therapy. I felt this huge, oddly familiar gulf between me and the rest of the world. It's one that opens up its gaping maw most often when I drop my daughter off at school and am surrounded by all those typical looking parents. I feel like I'm a space alien who has taken on human form: among others, yet disconnected.

But then I remembered that the last time I got that feeling, I end up smiling secretly. Because who knows what people see when they look at me. Maybe one of you is standing right next to me with your secret blog and your crazy life and thinking, "Damn. I bet she'd never understand where I am right now." After all, I don't know what most of you look like, and most of you don't know me. And if I look at pictures of myself, I'm smiling with my family and friends in a house that (as far as the narrow scope of the camera lens goes) looks cozy and neat. Most of us look normal on the outside, but it seems to be largely because we present to the world the pictures we want them to see.