"Comparison is the thief of joy." - Theodore Roosevelt
Do you ever find yourself knee-deep in someone else's social media highlight reel, wondering how they're closing six-figure deals from Bali while you're trying to figure out what's for dinner and whether or not that noise your car is making is going to result in an expensive fix?
Yeah, same!
I'm here to tell you, it's wildly easy to feel like we are falling short in these days of social media. It's a full-time illusionist. We see the curated content, the perfect lighting, the smiling kids, the romantic vacations, the big wins - and we start writing the story in our heads that we are behind. Not successful enough. Not a good enough parent. Not traveling enough. Not earning enough. Not saving enough. Not enough.
Let's go ahead and call it what it is: Complete crap!
Nobody - and I mean nobody - has it all together. The people who look like they're crushing life are also waking up at 3 a.m., questioning everything. They've got their chaos, their stress, their own "What the hell am I doing?" moments. You just don't see those things in their social feeds.
I get it. I'm as guilty of this as anyone else. I post a lot of good stuff. Not because I'm trying to fake a perfect life, but because I choose to focus on the positive. It's a coping mechanism. Trust me, it's not all sunshine and rainbows over here either. Brad and I have been deep in some personal hell lately - kid-related chaos (honestly, mostly "other parent" chaos, because co-parenting is not always the Pinterest-worthy team effort we imagined).
It's been hard. Hard. I just don't air it out online - not because I'm hiding it, but because reliving it in public drags me down even more. I need all the emotional energy I can spare for things that help me move forward, not things that anchor me to that stress.
Life is messy. For me. For you. For the people you think are "doing it better." Instead of letting other people's perceived perfection send us into a shame spiral, what if we just didn't?
What if we focused on being a little better than we were yesterday? What if we tracked our progress instead of someone else's finish line?
While we're at it, how about we flip the script? Instead of comparing ourselves to people we admire, what if we told them what we admire about them? Without turning it into some twisted internal roast about our shortcomings. Let's straight-up celebrate someone else's magic.
We need to stop measuring ourselves against the internet's greatest hits and start measuring our growth. We need to be kinder to ourselves. We need to extend a little grace to the people around us. Odds are, they need it as much as we do.
Progress, not perfection. Every. Damn. Day!
