I was an avid user of Facebook back in the days and this was basically because I was using it as a front to look for writing gigs, however, one thing with Facebook is that people are mostly used to packaging and aggrandizing their skillsets in other to get better exposure, recommendations and finally climb up the ladder.
But this post isn't really about Facebook. I got used to all this packaging so much that I even attained mastery of it and did it better than so many others who started it before me. I believe that packaging is an art, it takes sheer creativity to convince people that you're more than what you're portraying. However, my style of packaging was to make myself more marketable.
Of course, this meant better vocabulary, adopting a classy and stylish method of conversation, being able to take pictures that matched the profile, and so on, this meant doing a ridiculous amount of work on myself, of course, I had to change a lot about myself and the final piece of the puzzle was working on the way I looked. The point is that I became better at creating a better external impression, after all, it was easy to create an online personality for honest purposes.
Down the years, I've come to see that these abilities to create effortless packaging haven't left me, one of the reasons for this is that I have a niggling health conditions that gives me away anything I come face to face with people in real life, so I had to do a lot of concealation on myself, not because I was ashamed of my condition.
This was because I wanted people to mostly see me differently; abled, strong, innovations and dogged. So generally, packaging was the only way I could achieve this, we live in a world where one's mostly judged for how they looked, talked, or seemed, I do not blame anyone for this, I felt we cannot change some of our humanistic sides, so the best way for me was to adjust to it and do better.
I achieved most of these, but I got to a point where I became tired of the packaging and wanted people to begin to see beyond the whole thing. Meanwhile, packaging is different from living a fake life, a fake life is totally erasing who you are and creating a different deceptive identity, packaging is more of adding to what you are to create an appeal or acceptance.
I got to a time when I wanted to begin to create romantic affiliations with some of the women I met online, this was when I realized I had packaged myself to the extent that it might take some mental intelligence to see through the whole packaging. This made me learn one important lesson, people are too ignorant to seek further, beyond what they perceive and this is why people create expectations when they should be intentional and conscious.
There was this lady who was on my tail for too long, I was trying to get her to know who I was, but she already decided she wanted in because of the impressions and the pictures she saw, to me that was vain and shallow. It was partially my fault though, it's probably why I went radio silent on every social media.
Trust me, I am a social media person, but in a more digressed way, hive has a way of making you stick to the natural perception of who you are with minimal packaging. Over time, when people see me differently, I'm always quick to tell them that that version of me is quite different.
In reality, there's just a thin line between fakery and packaging, sometimes we might just choose to be the latter, but we might not know when we'll slip into the former. In my bid to curtail myself, I try creating a more natural, unedited version of myself because, the more I got older, the less traction I actually crave. This is to say that getting older makes people seek privacy rather than the limelight.
For example, chatting is one of the things I no longer find interesting anymore, the pleasure I use to derive from it is now vain, it's mostly why I never really dated that much a while back. The thrill of the talking stages felt dead, the idea of unearthing myself and all felt tiring and this was because I was changing. I was paying more attention to my body, and how it seem to get overloaded with age and responsibilities, these things made it difficult for me to want to keep that cocoon of packaging and one thing I can say is that the process of aging takes its toll, surprisingly I'm 29, but I've lost all that agility and vibe compared to when I was 24 or 25.
However this isn't bad, it's just that keeping up appearances and adjustability can be difficult. In the past I was always ashamed of talking to people about who I was, and how it limited me in so many ways, but as an older person now, it's become what I mostly want to do. I feel that growing up is difficult, I missed the thrill of uncertainty and how times were simpler.
These days, life becomes so hectic, it makes it difficult to discover new things to enjoy. I do understand that I'm not in a different phase of my life, where I can no longer package myself as I used to, it comes with its own disadvantages, but I want to hold on to the fact that, it's making me freer, unafraid of feedbacks, consequences, and rejection.
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