“This too shall pass,” my mom said to me as I was recapping what felt like a series of unfortunate events that had been the last 2 weeks.
“Really, you will look back and laugh at that,” she said as I worried about the toddler’s strange new habit of not swallowing her food.
The truth is she’s right. But when we get to see so much of others peoples lives on Facebook and Instagram it can sometimes feel like you are the only person having a bad day, week, month or year.
It can feel like you are the only one with the messy house, with the sick kids, or whose marriage isn’t picture perfect. It can feel like you are the only one who’s kid is being bullied or who isn’t feeling #blessed at the moment. It can make you start weighing your happiness against a bunch of perfectly curated images and status updates.
Life is much messier than an Instagram story. Life is what happens before and after that post. Life is not the beautifully photographed meal you see on Facebook but a toddler covered in applesauce and a son pushing the meal around with his fork asking if he has to eat it. It’s a kitchen that is inevitably a disaster because people cook and eat 3 meals a day in it.
Right now with two young kids, my life is far from the beautiful images I see on Instagram. It’s messy and loud and chaotic and often times it’s boring. It’s mundane. It’s the same day to day of getting the kids to school and starting work. It’s piles of laundry and dishes that never seem to end. It’s doing everything and it feeling like you’ve accomplished nothing. It’s falling onto the couch with a glass of wine at the end of the night and just hoping you can make it through 2 hours of the Bachelor.
And I have to bet that most people that you know and see every day, their lives aren’t all that perfect either. They don’t have it all together, no matter how it may appear on Facebook their lives are just as chaotic, messy and complicated as yours and mine are.
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