I’m taking a one-day break from design babble to talk about how ordinary folks are represented in lifestyle articles.
I’m sure you have your fill of “fave-celebrity-doing-normal-things” viral posts, but when a call for a lifestyle or inspirational article about people like you and me are brought up, the editors sometimes get a knee-jerk reaction to “glam up” the subject, or twist the slant of the article to make the person appear cooler than he or she is. If there was a shoot involved, the subject would be made up and styled for the camera, and there would be a lot of posing and art direction.
But who wants to be glamorous now, in the midst of a raging pandemic? Whenever I read an article that sort of makes the subject try too hard, I shake a little bit in embarrassment.
So when my writer friend Agay Llanera wanted to interview me for an honest article about dealing with middle age for informative and no-nonsense website panahon.tv, I said yes.
The article was about how women were thriving in their mid-life phase. It was only then that I realized that I have been middle-aged for more than five years now, and the interview made me think of where I was now, and if I was happily embracing this stage.
What struck me, aside from the extremely confident insights of my co-interviewees, was the raw honesty of all their answers. No one was glammed up, no one was forced to be cool — we just shared how we dealt with our daily lives and dreams in the simplest and most sensible ways.
If you want to read about some of our honest thoughts (or if you want to be shocked by our respective ages), check out the article here.
Rachelle Medina 