I don’t wade out into the Twitterverse very often but occasionally I’ll log on and see what’s happening. Today I noticed the trending topic #itshardwhen and thought I’d see what that was about. The messages scrolled through so quickly (about 10 per second) that they were hard to read, but they fell roughly into three categories: love/relationships, sex, and money/hardship.
It’s amazing to read a cacophony of answers to the question. There’s a lot of pain out there. A lot of people who are missing others, who wish they were being missed but are not, who expect a response from a loved one or boss or friend and get a wholly different response. There are LOTS of broken hearts, crushed ambitions, regrets. Many people feel invisible, or tongue-tied, or hopeless.
Then there are all the people whose minds are in the gutter (and if that’s what first came to mind when you saw the words “its hard when,” well, you can imagine all the responses.) And lots of tweets about Justin Bieber – when will THAT trend be over?
And finally there’s the general malaise about not making it, feeling like a failure. Letting circumstances get the better of you. It’s hard to keep going but the alternative is worse.
But does everyone type out their true feelings into 140 characters, or is there still a façade to be presented to the world? Some tweets mentioned that they wanted to say one thing but typed out another. Once words are posted they can’t be taken back easily. In more ways than one.
