How not to get caught up in the seemingly perfect worlds that are Pinterest, Vlogging and Blogging

I read a fantastic and really interesting blog post written by fellow blogger and my good friend Hayley from Sparkles and Stretchmarks. The post talks about the seemingly perfect world that people often create or show via their Instagram feeds. She talks about the reasons why some of us might set pictures up rather than just take a snap of our everyday lives, she makes some really interesting points but mostly reminds us all not to get caught up on the way that someone else's instagram feed looks. Because as she so rightly puts it, "a perfect Instagram shot does not a perfect life make'.

In all honestly -  her honest words and reminder couldn't have come at a better time for me. After what I now recognise as a totally silly evening of me tearing myself apart for a video I'd recorded for youTube where I stumbled and stuttered over my words. Where I analysed and picked myself apart over and over again, frustrated at myself for not being able to speak clearly. "Why can't I be like everyone else?!" I wondered.. "Why can't I just be a confident speaker?!" "Why do I fail at everything?!"

And then I spent the next few hours upset as I edited my video together knowing that it still didn't really make sense, finding it hard to watch myself feel so unconfident and uncomfortable. I thought about giving up, quitting all together, after all I didn't feel good enough. Why would someone choose to watch my video when they could sit and watch someone else's perfectly spoken, perfectly made video. 

But then I slept on it and I woke up this morning and realised just how ridiculous the whole thing was, because whilst my video isn't perfect and whilst I spent more hours agonising over it than I should have and will do again. It's who I am. It's where I'm at right now in my life.. I'm not the most confident person and definitely not the most confident speaker. But yesterday I made that awful mistake of comparing my own beginning to somebody else's middle and ended up putting an incredible amount of pressure on myself, which in fact only made things worse. 

After a good nights sleep and time to reflect - I'm feeling confident.. I'm feeling confident enough to press publish on my non perfect video, to sit and write this ramble of a blog post, to share my sometimes grainy blog photos taken in sometimes very poor lighting. I'm confident to do this because that is where I'm at. That is who I am right now. I will continue to want to and try to improve and to climb the ladder of confidence in everything I do in life. I will expect to fall but I'll pick myself up and will aim to be stronger than I was before. And I'll be honest about the fact that you won't see 'perfection' here. So if you're that person that likes to pick peoples faults apart - than there's plenty to be found here, whilst I continue on my journey of what is being just a normal human being. Because the truth in all of this is that I don't fail at everything - I try my best and that's really all any of us can do. And anyway, us parents only need to take a look at our children's smiles and hear their laughter to know that none of us could ever truly call ourselves failures. 

I'm pretty sure that we all have those days..  those days where we compare ourselves, our lives, the way we do things, the skills we have and so much more, to those of others. Those of us that spend hours reading blogs, flicking through our favourite Instagram accounts, pinning other peoples perfect pinterest images and watching in wonder as people with no previous expertise or experience manage somehow to take the most perfect, professional looking photographs and shoot the most stunning videos. It's becoming difficult not to let ourselves get caught up in other peoples 'perfection'. After all.. it's made to (mostly) look like their 'perfection' comes with ease.

I can't speak for everyone else, I really can't. But I can tell you that whilst  I recognise that I'm lucky enough to have a wonderful life and am so blessed to have such amazing people in it. It's not always smiles and laughter. Life can sometimes feel a little tough, things don't always go the way we intend them to (like last night!) and this is particularly true for parents. Everyone knows that being a parent is the greatest but hardest journey you'll ever take - but we can sometimes forget, when we look at what other people are sharing, that there's no exception to this. What we tend to forget when we see a family sharing a perfect image of them all directly looking into the camera smiling is, that whilst they could have got that in one shot, they also could have taken twenty shots to get it. They might have got lucky and got it in less than a minute or it might have taken them half an hour or longer to set it up. What I'm trying to say is that we all have to remember that none of us really know the full story behind the picture, or the video or the blog post. And what we all need to remember is to stay true to ourselves, because true happiness, which is as close to perfection as any of us are ever going to get, really does come from within.