Kyle has brought to my attention that this record of our travels makes our lives look so laid back and easy. Thrilling and adventurous! We’re driving across the country! We’re at the aquarium! We’re visiting friends and family! We saw an alligator! And, yes, we are absolutely doing all of those things, but that is not the entire picture.

There’s been a recent upsurge in “truthful social media” where people post a picture of themselves looking absolutely pristine but share that they’d actually cried their eyes out earlier because their friend just died or something equally as awful. It’s calling out the fact that everyone shows their best face on the internet and how we’re all lying just a little bit.

For every cute photo I post of Kyle and I together what you’re not seeing is the eye rolling and feet dragging that leads up to it. You don’t see me trying to sneakily set up the self timer. You don’t see how grouchy I get when Kyle intentionally ruins a photo I was really excited about. I dread broaching the topic of wedding photos because I’ve never known anyone who hates taking photos the way Kyle does. (This does not mean there will be no wedding photos. THERE WILL BE PLENTY OF WEDDING PHOTOS…eventually.)

For every four hour aquarium visit there’s hundreds of hours spent knitting, writing, sculpting, driving, casting, cleaning and cooking. Most mornings start with coffee, contemplation, and a twenty-item to do list on a Post-It brand* notepad. Items listed range from posting on Instagram to knitting a hat to making sure ten pieces are cast in the next 24 hours. Sometimes the toilet needs cleaning. Sometimes we need to remember to drink water. Make important phone calls. Mark items in our shops down for sale.

“When was the last time I took a full day off?” Kyle asked me casually the other day.

“Erm…” I tried to think. “Was it Christmas? I feel like it was Christmas.”

“No. On Christmas I was adding the finishing touches to that sculpt, remember?”

We’re constantly working. We’re honestly pretty boring.

I don’t write about the boring times because they just seem so dull. I’ve started tens of blogs about how some of my favorite times are when we’re sitting in Sandwich playing Rummy. People want to read about adventure, not how excited I got when Kyle decided to start cutting our sponges in half (twice as many sponges!) or learned a new knitting technique (three needle bind off!). There’s nothing thrilling about two people in love sitting in opposite corners of their abode quietly ignoring each other. We do spend an inordinate amount of time doing repetitive tasks in odd places, but who wants to know about that when they can read about the time we saw fifty manatees and an armadillo?

I don’t want to use this space to bemoan the fact that sometimes I miss the stability of a regular job. It’s incredibly stressful to not know where your next paycheck is coming from or if it’s coming at all. It’s hard to put yourself out there. It’s hard to only depend on yourself.

Kyle dreams of at least four days parked by a river with nothing to do but finish reading a book. No deadlines. No stress. Even when we were in the Florida Keys on a gorgeous beach Kyle was sculpting, sanding, photographing. He never ever stops because when you work for yourself you can’t. It’s a constant barrage of self-promotion and fighting to keep your self-esteem up. If a piece doesn’t sell, for either of us, our morale takes a nosedive and we have to drag ourselves up out of that hole and plow forward.

It’s the dragging ourselves back up again that’s the hardest. Putting on a brave face and lying to the world. There’s a photo of us from very early on in this adventure, about a month in, and we’re standing on a mountain in Upstate New York making silly faces. My lips are pursed and pushed off to one side and Kyle has one eye closed and his teeth bared. To the untrained eye we look like two people in love, goofing around in a beautiful place. When I look at that photo I see two people who’ve been fighting all day for no particular reason. Maybe we were hungry, or one of us left a mess for the other to clean up. It might have been something big, or it might have been nothing at all. I don’t remember the specifics but I know that we had been yelling at each other just moments before. We fight about all sorts of things but none of them are particularly important. So I grabbed my phone and we we made our faces as cute as we could to show the world how much fun we were having.

So that’s the truth of it. We’re broke, we’re boring, and we bicker. But despite all that – we’re pretty happy.

We now return to our regularly scheduled programming.

*How does one get sponsorship from Post-It? Anyone? Bueller?