12/26/2025
Staying Human in a Filtered World
Christmas has been weird.
Not sad. Not wrong. Just… different. And maybe that’s because everything else feels different too.
My book is launching. That part is exciting—deeply, genuinely exciting. This thing I’ve carried for years is finally stepping into the world. Therapized isn’t just a book; it’s a record of survival, reflection, and learning how to stay human when systems, expectations, and even good intentions pull you away from yourself.
But launching a book comes with its own strangeness. Photo shoots that don’t quite look like me. Images that are technically “good” but feel unfamiliar. Hair down when it’s usually in a bun. Makeup when I usually take five minutes to get ready—because I’m busy living. Sometimes even when I’m dressed up, my hair still isn’t “done.” That’s just who I am. And yet, every time I see those polished images, there’s a moment of disorientation. Not because they’re bad—but because they aren’t me.
And lately, that feeling has been amplified by something bigger.
AI is fascinating. Truly. It can be creative, helpful, funny, efficient. It can be used for good—and we actually used it that way over the holidays. My family and I were joking around, making images of ourselves as if we were other people. It was hilarious. Clearly fake. Clearly a joke. Our dogs were the only ones who actually looked like themselves. Everyone else wasn’t us at all.
My son even posted one of the images as if it were me—and I genuinely don’t know if people thought it was actually me. Or him. Or my husband. That’s the part that stopped me.
Because the joke landed a little too easily.
It made me realize how accustomed we’ve become to distortion. Botox. Fillers. Filters. AI enhancements. Faces that don’t move. Bodies that don’t age. Images that don’t resemble the people standing next to you on the street. We laughed—but underneath it, something heavier surfaced. This is the world we’re living in now: one where fake feels normal enough that a joke can pass as real.
And that makes me a little sad.
I think about my grandmother—how she aged. How beautiful she was as an older woman. How her face told a story. And my mom too. She died young, but even then, she was older to me. And she was beautiful. Natural. Unfiltered. Human.
Now we have twenty-year-olds doing Botox and fillers before they’ve even had a chance to be themselves. We’re erasing expression before it has time to form. And AI takes it even further—so much so that sometimes I look at photos online and genuinely wonder: is any of this real? Are these images real? Are any of them?
The perfect Christmas pictures. The flawless faces. The curated joy. To be honest—it’s mostly bu****it.
I’ve also noticed something else—many of the articles I’ve written lately sound similar. The themes repeat. The ideas circle back. At first, I wondered if that meant I was stuck.
Now I understand it means the message is important.
Repetition isn’t laziness. It’s insistence. It’s the way truth works its way through us until it finally lands. The world keeps speeding up, smoothing over edges, replacing presence with performance—and I keep writing about slowing down, telling the truth, staying grounded, choosing authenticity. Not because I lack new thoughts, but because we still haven’t absorbed the old ones.
Christmas used to be grounding. Imperfect. Loud in some places, quiet in others. Human. Now it often feels like another performance—another moment to capture, edit, improve. And for years, I thought something was wrong with me for being quieter during the holidays.
There wasn’t.
Quiet is how I resist distortion.
This Christmas, the most exciting thing I did was go to church for Jesus’s birthday. The rest was simple. My family. Comfortable clothes. Being lazy together. The day after Christmas is quiet too. Some people go back to work. Some don’t. In New York, there’s a snowstorm coming—an actual reason to slow down. To stay in. To reflect.
And reflecting on that silly AI joke showed me something else: how posting one image can reveal who’s close to you, and who’s drifting. Who notices when something isn’t real. Who thinks it’s normal to present something completely altered as truth. It’s like shedding leaves from a tree—something I write about in my book. People are there for a season. They matter when they’re meant to. And then paths diverge. That’s not bitterness. It’s growth.
At its core, Christmas honors the most unfiltered arrival imaginable. No spectacle. No perfection. No enhancement. Just Jesus—born into vulnerability, humility, and presence. Rest wasn’t a break from meaning; it was the meaning.
So while my book steps into the world—and while technology keeps asking us to become shinier, smoother versions of ourselves—I’m choosing something else.
I’m choosing to stay recognizable to myself.
I’m actually excited to be getting older. A lot of people don’t have that privilege. Aging means I’m still here. Still learning. Still shedding what no longer fits.
If Therapized does anything, I hope it reminds people that healing doesn’t come from upgrading who we are. It comes from returning to ourselves—again and again—even if it sounds repetitive, even if it isn’t flashy, even if it’s quiet.
Especially if it’s quiet.
