Let’s Confess Our Failures

As I was driving over to Chapel Hill to meet my friend Hannah and her mother for lunch I heard a story on NPR about the perfect lives people put out on social media and the harm it is doing. I’m not exactly sure that was the gist of the whole story because my mind started wondering about my life on social media.

As an eight year daily blogger I put a sh#$ load amount of stuff about me out into the universe. It started as a way to raise money for the Food Bank and turned into, “what the hell did I do today?” I don’t write this to try and make my life seem perfect. That would be a futile exercise.

I do it for accountability and to be real. Granted I don’t often write about the absolute worst thing that happened that day unless it was very funny. I never publish my real weight or if I found an unwanted hair someplace on my face.

I get that many on social media touch up their photos or use flattering lighting wanting the world to see them at their best. So to combat this fake social media world I am going to publish what I fail at as often as I can to show that life goes on exactly the same way. Actually life is better if you fail at something regularly. Not the same thing, but something different every once in a while.

You really only learn from your failures. If you did everything perfectly the first time you tried you would not have any reason to keep doing that thing. You would not have the satisfaction of improving.

I did not try anything new today so I don’t have a big failure to confess. But I didn’t put my clothes away for the last three days and have let them pile up on my vanity. I spent two hours in the middle of the day watching you tube videos trying to figure out what brand of primer I need to use when I paint the kitchen cabinets next month. I purposely avoided running into someone I saw out of the corner of my eye when I was out today and I didn’t cook any new food and just made my family forage in the fridge for leftovers for dinner. Not big failures, but nothing to be proud about.

Let’s turn social media into the place people can come and feel good about themselves because they were way more productive today than somebody else. Tonight, more unproductiveness, Needlepoint and Netflix, but boy am I happy.