This blog is my reaction to articles like We Need to Quit Telling Lies on Facebook and Stop Instagramming Your Perfect Life
There seems to be a movement lately to criticize people who stay positive in their online posts, people who show a "highlight reel" of their lives and only show the good and leave out the bad. I am not part of this movement and I don't believe I will be jumping on the bandwagon any time soon. I will now explain why. I feel that it is a given that negative things happen, in my humble opinion people should logically know that nobody has a perfect life in which nothing bad ever happens.
I can not remember a time in which I did not see the positive in practically every situation. I was raised by positive, supportive and happy people. While I did not have a perfect life and we were actually very poor, I had an amazing childhood. Bad things happened, as they do to many people in their childhood, but I knew that there is always someone who has it worse and that if I let myself get bogged down in the negative, that it would be like quicksand and it would be very difficult for me to get out. Granted, this was not a conscious knowledge, more of an underlying understanding based on my parent's way of telling it like it is and staying completely honest with me throughout my life.
Starting in my childhood, long before the social networking sites, blogs and even e-mail were the preferred method of contact; I stayed positive, when people asked me how I was doing I spoke about the positive things, not the negative. In my life there are a very select few people that I will vent to, because these people understand me, they understand that I prefer to focus on the positive and that I feel that no matter what the situation, there can be a positive spin.
My reaction to this movement of telling positive people that they are "lying" or being "dishonest" on their social network feeds is fairly simple. Do I intentionally post happy, sunshine-y posts in order to get under people's skin? NO. Do I want the positive things I post to make someone else feel inferior or to make others think that I have the perfect life? Of course not. Anyone who truly knows me in real life knows that I want nothing more than for other people to be lifted up. I want my friend who lost both parents, had two beautiful daughters with a dead-beat and somehow manages to be one of the most amazing people I know to know that she is amazing. I want my friends who have decided to be stay-at-home moms to know that I understand the hard work they put in and that I know they should get breaks and take "me" time and not have to feel guilty about it. I want the person I had a falling out with to know that I still think they have made a wonderful life for their family and that their children are absolutely beautiful and even though we may not talk to each other, I think they are doing a wonderful job.
I post the positive because I feel positive about things, I am happy, God has done amazing things in our lives, even though we have been through some very hard times. When we are going through the struggles we will post a status like this: "Routine 3 day stay with chemo for Blake this week. Please pray for good results." And we will post pictures of us in the hospital making blanket forts and drawing on the windows with window paint. Do we do this because we want to give people the illusion that hospital life is perfect and whoever says it is hard is just making things up? NO, we post things like this because we want to show that no matter what the situation, good things can still happen. Did we have a sick child, yes we did, but we are also blessed with two amazingly healthy children (now all three are healthy and we are so very blessed). I feel that we are telling the truth. I do not feel that posting the positive is lying, I feel that we are showing our family spirit through what we post. Everything is going to be alright. Our earthly troubles are momentary, fleeting, they are not permanent.
So this one time I am going to tell my friends, my real life friends, my social network friends, people I knew in Cincinnati when I was 9 years old, all of the people who follow blogs or are friends on facebook/twitter etc: I am a human being, so is my husband, so are our children. Travis and I do argue, it happens, we are committed to working out all of our issues every time because we made a life long commitment to each other and both of us are very stubborn and head strong and we refuse to back down from our commitments. We also happen to love each other deeply, we can't keep our hands off each other (hence the 3 kids) and almost every time we argue it ends in laughter. Our children disobey sometimes, we have one who is extremely laid back, almost too laid back at times, but is amazing to us and we love this child regardless of how laid back they are. We have another child who likes to deconstruct things and has a tendency to say words in a funny way, we love this child and consider ourselves blessed. We have another child who must research everything, has to get their hands on every little thing and is a lot of work to keep up with. All of our children are constantly active and keeping an eye on all of them is a full time job in and of itself (and yes we both work paying jobs as well). Sometimes our house gets messy, sometimes our house is clean, usually it is somewhere right in the middle. Are we embarrassed that we are human, no. Do we feel like people will think less of us if we post anything negative, no. However, we feel that sometimes the instant sharing that is now at our fingertips can be dangerous. We do not feel the need to involve all of our friends and family (everyone who made enough of a positive impact on our lives to be a friend on facebook or twitter etc.) in our personal arguments or our parenting decisions. Facebook does not need to know if we had a NUCB (natural un-medicated childbirth), whether our children were breastfed or not, what kind of diapers we used etc. They don't need to know how well our kids sleep at night or whether we use redirection or spanking methods. They don't even necessarily need to know who we voted for. To us it just isn't necessary to post the negative. It seems like society in general focuses on the negative too much already. The news is filled with violence and sadness, tv shows are overly dramatic and make little sense. Why should we add to the negative that we see so much in the world.
Anyone who has lived life knows that there is negative and there is positive. If you focus on the negative you are stuck, you will always envy other people, no matter what shows up on their social networking sites. I question why anyone would want to bring anyone else down, why would they want to make someone feel guilty for sharing the positive? In what way does it benefit someone else to see the negative aspects of someone else's life? Ask my close friends and family members, sometimes I do get frustrated, usually it is about the ways people are driving and how people can't bring themselves to watch the road instead of doing their social networking on the road while "driving". If you want to know the negatives of our life, become a close friend, spend time with us in real life. We are not secretive, we are very upfront about things. Including the struggles of having a child diagnosed with Leukemia and the fear and treatment that follows that diagnosis. We are not hiding our real lives, we are just sharing the things we want to remember. The good things and the happy memories!
I can count on one hand the negative things I have posted on social networking sites and I am not ashamed of that. I am not ashamed of the hard parts of our life, I am not embarrassed to be human, it just isn't the part of my life I focus on!
I have more, but perhaps I will post a part 2 later on!
We are truly very blessed whether everything is going great or not!
