Life is not an episode of The Bachelor: A crowd of adoring females dressed for a beauty pageant waiting to woo you, to hang on your every word, to be there for “all the right reasons”– and evenings whisked off on private helicopters to beachfront fantasy suites. Life is not whitewashed posts where every awful midnight trip to the ER becomes reimagined in a shot of a cast with everyone smiling at this grand ‘ol time, complete with a winky smile emoticon and a funny quip. Life is not handstand kisses with your partner and perfectly cute dogs getting into adorable hijinks at the edge of your mat.

Not all the time. Maybe never.

Life is the pile of laundry on my bed we’ve dubbed “laundry mountain” and the pile of dishes in the sink competing for highest vertical limit with the laundry (laundry is winning). It’s the rain and the sick kid and the sick and always working spouse and have I mentioned I’m a little injured messing up my yoga happy dippy self and my body is tired of fighting all these microbes? And congratulations you’ve just heard the urgent “mom” called across the room for the one hundred-millionth time and who the f–k makes toy whistles for children and where is the ring in Dante’s Inferno for parents who give those out at birthday parties but hey I guess it’s better than sugar? Should I add that I’m sick so sick of eating all my meals alone or with a four-year-old; I just wonder what adults say in conversations over a table…. is this why all my conversations freed from home captivity seems to float around sex?

For my next act, I’ll clean up the beagle’s spiteful piss.

But I’ll get on my mat even though nothing is perfect. Where is creativity, where is the source of life if everything has to be perfect, clean, lovely and like-able for public consumption? Like childbirth, we’ve cleaned the muck and the blood and the animal howls up with incisions and sanitizer and hospital corners and back at work in less than two weeks– and now we’ve cleaned everything that comes after, at least on the outside. Where is the mess, the mistake, the day that didn’t go as planned? Where is the day life handed you lemons but you said fuck I don’t want lemonade? The day you gave the finger to all those watching and reveled in your own inner four-year-old’s temper tantrum? The day you didn’t handle it as gracefully as you appeared to on Instagram.

Good things come from the recipes gone awry. Like penne alla vodka.

I don’t come to yoga to pretend. I don’t come to plan. Don’t get me wrong: I love your happy, stylized, thought-out posts. I post shiny happy musical shit myself because yoga brings that out in me and hey man, when I’m on the beach in Costa Rica this summer you better believe I’ll be posting a bikini selfie at some incredibly flattering angle. But I know — and yet still have to remind myself — that there is more than that. I hate to pollyannically admit this, but the best moments on the mat (and life) are the unplanned and the unfeigned, even with the blueprint of ashtanga.

I suppose what I write is pointless. We’ll continue to package ourselves “positive” because positive sells, man, and everyone wants likes. You win! Smile baby! Like Like Like like like like. But there is a downside to “positive” because of the death it forces upon creativity, juice, mojo, touch and raw, unenslaved life. Yeah, you take that intelligent baby creature out of the water and take that sweet selfie; the only price is the dolphin’s life. There’s so much richness in the dark, the bad, the moody, the mistaken, the lonely and the unpretty. What will become of us, if for more and more moments of our lives, we are not spontaneous actors but producers of our own reality shows, complete with reality TV levels of intervention and falsity. Congratulations!  You are your very own parasitic paparazzo. The staging of our lives online whether we’re talking by yoga teachers or parents has become so mind-numbingly praise-worthy that I thank God for good fiction, the final frontier of truly abject, abysmal failure.

I wonder about you, the real you, behind those planned posts. I wonder about Me.

Perhaps we cannot fix this online — we’re just not free here– but I hope we will all carve some space to be unedited, unfunny and uncute. Fire your inner publicist. Uncensor yourself. Remove yourself from the banned books list. Go on: Say something wrong. Really wrong. Take a bath in it.

[Really, though, don’t post it online. Send it to me; I won’t share it. Unless it’s scary or illegal, because then I’ll have nightmares.]

So for this time on my mat I will enjoy just being whatever is in me today. I will be where I am even if I can’t package it nicely with a bow and a quote for public swiping consumption (or rather I could Rumi it up, but choose not to, because I’m in no mood for being artifically sweet). Oh yes, it’s clear: I may still be an asshole, after all. I get on this mat everyday anyway and all there is, is me here now, changing; all there is, is everything. I will move through this transitory shitty lonely week I’m having. Inhale, exhale: I’m alive.

The Bachelor sounds like hell anyway.