We go about our lives, increasingly on display. In the old days (i.e., the late 1990’s) when internet service was slow and modems were noisy, with their boing-boing-ccchhhhhhh calls of power, we resorted to sharing via snail mail. A snapshot printed on a photo card, sent out during the holiday season. A few photos enclosed with a thank you note. This was about all we would present to the outside world: a glossy version of our lives, maybe with a carefully edited note on recent happenings.
The video version of our lives, of course, is undoubtedly less attractive. Yes, we now have YouTube, but I find it increasingly hard to believe that anything posted on there isn’t staged. And, the parts that are real, are still edited, in that holiday-card-ready kind of way. This is how we prefer to see our own, and each other’s lives. Nobody really wants to look at the outtakes, the parts that we want desperately to die a thousand deaths on the cutting room floor. And yet, somehow, it is those parts that tend to live on in some deep recesses of our minds, perhaps just reminding us that we, as human beings -- and especially when we human beings choose to live only within ourselves – are fallible and incomplete. It is the reaching out and connecting with others that makes us feel whole.
In our newfangled digital age, we see each other’s snapshots constantly on Facebook, Instagram, SnapChat (oops, wait I missed that!), tumblr, Twitter and probably a zillion other places. It was on Facebook that I saw a post from a friend that has made me think about these things. It said: Erik is missing. I looked at it and paused. Wasn’t her husband’s name Erik? This was not a post about a family pet. This was about her husband. I reached out via Facebook, and we spoke for the first time since our college years.
I would discover that the happy, carefree life of hers that I had viewed through the lens of holiday-card-emails and Facebook posts, had been punctuated by times of darkness that never showed in the snapshots I saw. Erik had battled an assortment of demons, with my friend holding her family together, insulating her children from the consequences of his addictions when she could, and finally setting boundaries on their interactions when she could not.
The struggles she faced living with a bipolar husband were finally highlighted, in video, on a newscast in Los Angeles. Although she is a very private person, she has shed her opaque veneer for a far more translucent one, with the public peering in on her and her family’s lives as they search for their husband and father, trading their privacy for the hope of finding him. She would continue peeling back the layers for the public, doing radio interviews, newspaper interviews, any medium that would take her story to a broader audience.
Summer has come and gone, still with no word on Erik’s whereabouts. And yet, there is hope – hope that he will be found, and hope that his story will help others. While I continue to post my own aspirational glossy snapshots, as well as view those of my friends, I will try to remember to reach out in real time, and be ready to lend support when the story behind the images is less than picture perfect.
For more information go to the Help Us Find Erik Lamberg page on Facebook.
