Appearances aren't everything.

The phrase "it's OK to not be OK" is most commonly heard when people have a life crisis or just can't get life together. I'm one of those people who can't ever get life together and I'm OK with that. Time management is hard, balancing college is hard, everything is hard. It seems like nothing is easy anymore. However, it's human nature to commonly mistake people for having better lives than us through how nice they look, Instagram bloggers and models on social media, or having ten people around them for a meal at the dining hall. It's extremely unfair based on appearances to judge what people's lives are like. I know because I was one of these people that got judged based on appearance.

For the majority of high school, I would wear makeup and dress up nice for the most part. However, this all started to change my senior year of high school. People generally knew I liked to achieve, do well in my classes, and make good grades. People also knew that I had money to dress nice. I quickly became attached with a label of having a good life and that everything was great(it was so not great, it really sucked). No matter how hard I tried, getting rid of this label seemed impossible.

What people didn't know about my seemingly "perfect" and objectified life was that my parents were separating and didn't talk to each other, gossip-filled my high school for things I didn't do, I encountered numerous manipulative men that took advantage of me, and my closest friend went to rehab. If anything during that time, I would openly trade lives with someone else(think Freaky Friday).

It's nice to be an average person getting a college degree.

Surprisingly, once college started, everything changed. I was no longer the "perfect" and "object" girl people looked up to and it was and still is very relieving. It's nice to be average and be a normal person getting a college degree. I've never felt so equal to other people and it's so relieving.

No one cares if I've worn the same sweatshirt three times in a week, or that I'm wearing lipstick that four guys told me they didn't like. People don't care what car I drive or the huge, unnecessary, lonely house I lived in. Money certainly doesn't buy you happiness, but people, family, faith, and friends do. And drinking that extra shot of Grey Goose doesn't necessarily help either. Reputations matter, but don't let it get to your head. More people think of themselves more than they do of others.

The point is everything is not what it seems. We put on brave faces and are supposed to act like nothing's wrong to make our way through the social world. From a sociological standpoint, humans fake a lot of their lives not on purpose. To know how one's life is going takes more than just linear communication but stopping and caring enough to have a full, meaningful one.