Don’t Judge Your Story By Someone Else’s Cover

In my efforts to help us all love our life and live our best life, I feel the need to talk about how easily we tend to judge or compare ourselves to what we perceive of others. My mission in life is to help just one person stop comparing, stop criticizing and to just stop wasting time and LOVE YOUR LIFE! Sounds simple, doesn’t it?

It is increasingly harder and harder in today’s world not to fall into the trap of believing other people’s image as their reality. This is not to say people are being fake or dis-genuine but let’s be real, most of us show what we want each other to see. Even if unintentionally misleading, in the world of social media today, most of us have painted a picture to the outside world that doesn’t always reflect our actual world, or at least not our normal day to day real life.

My goal is and always will be to be authentic and genuine in all that I do. So in that, I want to talk about a social media post I made back in the spring of last year.

I posted this picture of my daughter below, making a reference to The Wiggles and her “Big Red Car”. I had multiple friends, family and followers “like” the picture and comment on it, along with multiple direct messages as well. To my surprise, most comments and private messages had nothing to do with the car or my daughter, but were questions or comments about my home in the background. Please don’t get me wrong, I am happy to talk about or answer questions on my home if people are interested in that, but it was interesting to me that by posting this picture, I had unintentionally painted an image that I have it “all together”. It led people to believe that my home is neat and tidy, that things are always in place and life is flawless. At least, that’s what my followers told me. From this one post here’s what happened; To some, my home, it is fashionable with appealing decor. To some, they couldn’t understand how I parent, work and keep up the house. To some, I must not do well at parenting or work because “Come on, no one actually has it all together like this”… the list of assumptions and questions go on.

The hard truth is that what you cannot see from this post, is the sink FULL of dirty dishes had I moved my camera slightly further to the right. The very next frame has a sink overflowing with work unfinished, a mess not visible in my post.

What you also cannot see is that I am taking and posting this picture of my baby girl in effort to distract myself. No, not from the sink of dishes that need to be done, but from straight up gut wrenching  worry and guilt.

You see my youngest son has a fairly severe respiratory illnesses and this day was like others our wee man has encountered. We had just returned home from a beautiful walk and lunch together as a family and noticed his breathing had started to decline. He was working hard for his breath so off to the emergency room he and my husband go.

Now as if the worry of my son dealing through this isn't enough, this was the first time it had happened that I couldn’t be there with him. With a new baby at home that is exclusively breast fed, his dad was the sensible option this day. The guilt I felt as a Mom for not being there, for being home with his sister who needed me too, for having another baby, further dividing my attention and then the guilt for feeling that way for my daughter who is so young and just smiling and happy to be sitting in that “Big Red Car”.

I realize these feeling are part of life and I am able to make sense of them and work them through, the point of this post isn’t about Mom guilt necessarily. It is about the fact that I had then and still to this day receive comments and messages from people wondering how we live the life we live and have things together “all the time”. I am here to tell you we don’t. We don’t and that’s okay. We embrace the chaos and choose love every-time.

But you my dear, you need to do the same and please don’t lose sight of your own blessings when you see others post picture perfect photos. We all have love, we all have blessings and we all have struggles. Ask questions, ask for help, provide support, check in on a friend to make sure they are okay, and even when they say they are, ask again. It truly does take a village.

But above all, do not compare your reality to the image others put out there. We are all a beautiful mess, doing the best we can most days.