I’ve been following a woman online for like 10ish+ years. At first she had a blog but then it turned into Instagram and then into a Substack account. At the time I was probably thinking we had a few things in common. She was a pastor’s wife and a verbal processor, so she had to write all her thoughts. They were working on a church plant and she was raising six kids and I don’t know, I just was curious for whatever reason.

She writes under the Substack name Locusts and Honey. In the past year or two she completed a master’s degree in a spiritual director program. She was planning to be a spiritual director and meet with people and somehow serve in the church. Except now her husband is back to pastoring a church (after taking a break for mental illness and other things) and she just signed on for a job at a coffee shop, unrelated to her degree.

So now she’s wondering why she is yet again back in some kind of service work. I was minorly relating to some of this but what really was standing out to me is how she will only post incomplete pictures of her face. You see her face and there is only half of it, or enough to even see a majority but with only one eye. She has a pretty face with two eyes. I am to the point now where it’s almost irritating to me that she keeps doing this.

But I don’t want to be a troll and be like, “Please stop posting only half of your face”. I have almost said it several times but I know it’s not coming from a loving place. To me it’s just screaming, “I don’t respect myself”. She’ll show her husband’s full face, her kids’ full faces, but very very rarely hers. Another woman recently told me about her tick toc account so I’ve been watching it feeling bad for her. There is a reason people do this.

You put yourself out there because in some way it’s a way to cope with whatever it is that is missing. For one woman it’s her Substack, for another it’s her tick toc, and for me it’s my blogs. It makes me laugh. Cannot we all be happy, sane people? I hope one day this woman will just show her whole face without the weird artistic need to keep cropping it off. But it’s not going to come from me saying it to her, that’s for dang sure.