Don’t Believe What You Read

There’s an old saying that goes “don’t judge a person by his blog posts” or something like that. I think we as humans generally tend to rush to judgment before having all the information or to accept things at face value without taking the time to dig a little to get at the truth. I think we’re all comfortable as the judges, but when we are the judged, it stings.

Take me for example. A casual Patch user might read about my trip to , my review of , or the and think that I’m some fun-loving, outgoing guy who is enjoying his life.

But this assessment couldn’t be further from the truth. I write about these things (among other intellectual topics such as ) because they are the very few bright spots over the last few months of my life. I write about these brief windows of feeling well because people don’t want to read the truth. How I wake up to a fresh hell every day. How I take more pills each day than I had taken throughout my entire pre-30s life. How I feel extremely nauseated every waking moment. How my memory problems are starting to take their toll. How I will see more doctors in the next few weeks than I care to think about. How I’ve been sick for so long that I’m currently out of leave and spending most days of the week in an unpaid status. And how I seriously hope that the guy on the other end of the endoscope finds something wrong down there because that means that all this isn’t just in my head.

No. People don’t want to read about that. They would much rather read how much I . I chose to write about my glorious local haul from the Honeypot instead of my rattling haul from the pharmacy. I chose to write about the delicious pizza instead of the hours of sickness that I felt prior to and after enjoying a decent meal. I chose to write about something humorous instead of something really going on in my life.

Yeah, I’ve been able to make it to a store here and there. I’m sometimes able to make it to my girlfriend’s house so that I can lie in her bed or on her couch because I feel so miserable. Honestly, I don’t know how she puts up with it. And I’ve made it to a restaurant once in recent memory. But none of this is any indication as to how poorly I feel on a daily and hourly basis.

What I’m getting at is that we need to find compassion in ourselves and extend it to others. We need to consider that someone might be going through hell internally but trying to put on a brave face. We need to have patience and understanding for others. And at the end of the day, we need to make sure we have enough information before we start judging others.