When Life Feels Like a Race

Let me ask you a question. Have you ever found yourself scrolling on social media for, any length of time, really, and you come away suddenly feeling like you’re behind or that you need to be doing more in just about every area of your life? You see the Instagram mom that makes perfectly balanced lunches for her kids followed by the twenty-three-year-old running a successful entrepreneur business followed by the person who goes to the gym and runs the races followed by the couple that travels everywhere. 

              You may be seeing one aspect of each person’s life that they’re doing really well in, but somewhere between the scrolling and the tapping, there’s an odd sensation that starts to happen in your brain. Your brain is watching one person do well in one area of life, and a different person do well in another area, and you start to think that everybody is doing better at everything than you. The panic thoughts start creeping in. You know the ones. Everybody else has their life together. This isn’t where I thought I’d be. How is everyone else able to juggle all the balls when I’m dropping them left and right?

              Have you been there? Me too. Here’s the secret that makes all the difference. Social media is a series of snapshots that you get to pick and choose what to share. I’m probably not going to stop, take a picture, and share when my hair’s a mess, my shoe broke in a puddle on the way into a work meeting, and I forgot a rain jacket on a day when it was supposed to pour all day. It’s happened, it happens to all of us. Maybe not the specifics, but we’ve all had bad days. Rarely do people post the bad day candid pictures of their lives, the just rolled out of bed and running late hair, or the pile of laundry that’s been sitting in the basket for two weeks waiting to be put up.

Nobody has their life together all the time.

              Life is messy, in case you missed it before, I think the past few years have made that abundantly clear. People are messy too, and that’s okay. When you’re a kid, and you’re learning to write, it’s a mess of scribbles. Parents and teachers are about the only ones who can decipher it. Just about every class has that one kid though, the one that teases anyone who makes a mistake. If you had a good teacher, they would say something along the lines of, “It’s okay, we all make mistakes. We’re all learning together.”

              Take a breath. You’re not behind. It’s not a race; it’s just life. We’re all figuring it out together.