Monday, July 10, 2017

It's not what it looks like




A picture says more than a thousands words. Yes, but it's not always what it looks like. A few examples from my own life:

Picture Nr.1
Los Angeles, a few years ago. What a lovely day at the beach right? Not exactly. My husband and I were in the middle of an argument when we took this picture. We realized that we weren't going to solve the argument as quickly as we wanted so we said: "Let's just take some pictures of the beach first and then we can go somewhere and talk." Oh the joy of those first couple of years as newlyweds when you have many arguments that happen at the most inconvenient times because you don't know each other's weaknesses or sensitive spots yet so you keep stepping on each others' toes.




Picture Nr.2
Here we had made up and decided to go for a hike in Los Angeles. This was a nice moment but based on what you see in the picture you can't tell the huge difference between this picture and the first picture. Pictures tell you far from everything.




Picture Nr.3
I took this picture during a bike ride this spring. It looks like a wonderful day to take a bike ride but in reality it wasn't a fun day at all! The wind was ice cold and I was biking as fast as I could to get back home again as soon as possible.




Picture Nr.4
This was a very nice day during the spring. The weather was warm and I could bike in my t-shirt and I loved the feeling of being able to enjoy riding my bike again after the long break during winter. I never posted the picture of this nice moment on my blog because it doesn't look very enjoyable or pretty.




Picture Nr.5
Then there are those pictures of your home that will never make it onto a social media account. My husband kicked me out of our Master bedroom bathroom a year ago with these words: "You take up way too much of the counter space." I have no idea what he is talking about. Nowadays I treat our guest bathroom as my own bathroom where I can spread out my stuff as much as I want!




Picture Nr.6
As I was looking at the picture of this room I realized that it's about as "cozy" as a prison cell at the moment. I never intended for this room to have such an extreme minimalist decor but let's just say it's still "in process" of getting decorated. One of these days I will take the time to hang up the curtains that I bought months ago. The blinds work fine for now. The shelf that is on the bed also needs to be attached to the wall at some point. The thing is, July is a warm and sunny month and the last thing I want to do right now is spend time indoors. Home decorating will have to wait until a rainy and cold day in September.


These pictures are just a few examples of how different reality looks from our perfectly edited lives online. We have all followed people online who seem to have a perfect, beautiful and loving family until one day the parents tell the world that they are getting a divorce. The shiny pictures that the world got to see was far from reality. We also follow people online who seem to be skilled at finding something negative to complain about in each and every situation. No matter what they are faced with you can be sure that they will find a way to whine about it on their social media accounts. We look at these people's lives online and feel sorry for them since their lives seem to be so difficult and heavy all the time. When in reality the lives of these people might actually be pretty happy and awesome, they just won't tell you about those parts. They use their social media accounts as a place to spew out their negativity.


No matter if your Facebook friends' pages are full of perfect pictures or full of negativity you can be sure that reality is neither. Reality is that life is full of everyday struggles and difficult stuff but at the same time our lives are also full of blessings and beautiful things that we will notice if we look for them. Our world is both broken and beautiful. 


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