34
You know what I'm talking about. You sit up late looking at all the amazing things people do on Pinterest, or in somewhere else in the Blogisphere. At first, you are just thinking of all the cool things you would like to do, but at some point, it happens. You start to feel inadequate. You look at what other people do, and begin to feel like you aren't trying hard enough or that you aren't creative enough, or skinny enough or whatever.
It seems like we are even more susceptible to this kind of comparison during the holiday season. Magazines are full of the "perfect holiday", Pinterest abounds with ideas of what your home and holidays should look like, and every blog abounds with unattainable perfection. No matter how much we do, it never seems to take us to that land of perfection.
The trouble with this phenomenon is that we are only seeing part of the picture (when it comes to the "skinny enough" comparison, we are often literally only seeing part of the picture -- they photoshopped the other half away. But that's another topic altogether.) We see the part of people's lives that they want us to see -- the part that went well. We see the perfectly redecorated room, but we don't see the bickering spouses or the crying children or the debt or the simple bone-weariness that might have been part of the process. We see the perfect cheesecake, but we don't see the burnt pot roast. We see what worked, but we don't see what didn't work.
I recently saw a study which found that the more often people used facebook and other social media, the less happy they were. Why? They concluded that the reason people were less satisfied and more depressed had to do with comparing themselves with the perfection they saw on other people's posts. As Theodore Roosevelt said, "Comparison is the thief of joy."
So, in the spirit of showing you the reality of my home, here are some pictures:
Proof that even if you have been baking bread for many years, you can still have a flop.
Believe me, the picture doesn't do it justice:
And sometimes lovely, obedient children refuse to prove their amazingness during photo shoots:
Or the fabulous idea you had for hair bling ends up looking more like the Abominable Snowman sneezed on your stick:
And the Easter hat that was supposed to look like this:
Looks more like this:
So you rush to the store, buy yourself a new hat and forget it.
To top it all off, the bathroom doorknob breaks and your teenage daughter gets stuck in the bathroom. And your great idea to remove the offending doorknob and release her to freedom results in nothing more that a hole to pass food and water through.
(We must have eventually got her out because I don't think she's still in there.)
My point is that we all have things that don't work out like we planned, but we also all have a chance to enjoy life anyway. Don't let the glossy finish you see on other people's lives fool you.
