Are you Faking?

Today I have a guest post over on one of my favorite food blogs: Good Life Eats.  If you go check it out (click here), and you should because it's delicious, take note of the pretty table runner in my pictures there.  It is pretty, and it worked well in the photo, and it's a fake.

I wanted something bright and cheerful for the photo and I didn't have anything that fit the bill, so I faked it.  I grabbed a few pieces of material left over from another project, then I took the pictures from all the right angles so you couldn't tell that it was just a few scraps.  The pictures worked, so no big deal, right?

Right.  But it got me thinking.  It's so easy to fake things on the internet - just crop that picture so you don't see the laundry pile in the background.  It's almost as easy to fake things in real life too.   We all do it.  We smile and say we are fine, when we're not.  We spend money we don't have so we can fit in.  We go to church on Sunday, but forget the sermon by Monday.   We keep the front of the house clean, but throw all the junk behind the closed doors in the back.  We talk sweetly to our kids in the grocery store, and then scream at them when we get in the car.

We wish we were different, better, happier, more presentable.  But we're not.  So we fake it.

I just faked a little thing.  A table runner for goodness sake.  Then I started thinking how much nicer it would be to actually have that pretty table runner instead of just letting people believe I had it.  So I took the scraps and I sewed up a simple table runner in almost as much time as it took me to fold and fake the scraps for the picture.  It was actually more work to make the fake table runner look presentable than it was to just make a real one.

I realized, as I quickly snapped a photography of my newly sewn project, that I had made it harder than it needed to be.  If I had started with the real thing, instead of faking it first, I could have skipped a few steps.

Does life always work like that?  I would venture to say that yes, it's harder to be a fake.  I would even venture to say that it is easier to admit the truth about all the things you'd like to fake and then do whatever it takes to make them real in your life.

You can keep throwing all the junk into the back rooms of the house so that no one can see it from the front door.  That works.  But you could also admit that you have a mess to clean up and then get organized so you don't have to plug your  nose and watch your step every time you leave the front room.  That works better.