When Social Media Doesn’t Tell the Whole Story

If you follow me on IG Stories, you’d have thought we were having the most enjoyable Friday night this past weekend (and we were!) I posted a picture of our lake view from Jamie’s Army function (it was absolutely the most beautiful weather), and then I shared a picture of us smiling as we headed to our next stop of the evening – our local winery. Yay!

We were so relieved to have some time away from our sweet girls just the two of us and looked forward to ending the night by watching the sun set and sipping a glass of wine.

The next morning we woke up and Jamie made his homemade chocolate chip pancakes. I posted a picture of our one year old enjoying them immensely for the very first time. Life was good. Truly!

What I didn’t post is what happened in between those two pictures.

And this is where social media can be a liar, or at least misconstrue things to make you think that things are better than they really are.

After we left the lake, we decided to follow the GPS’s suggested route to the winery, even though it was a route we were unfamiliar with and included some gravel roads. BAD. IDEA.

Making a long story short, we got terribly lost. Like, really, really lost. The kind of lost where I wondered if we were even going to get home that night and if we had gotten ourselves in big trouble (as in we are going to be on the news kind of trouble). We’d wandered 20+ miles into Army training grounds, lost our route on the GPS, had little cell service, and were blocked in by barriers keeping others from entering the area we were in (meaning we couldn’t get out either!). The sun was rapidly going down and we were so far from any kind of “regular” dirt road. I swear we are pretty smart people (and actually very good at navigation), but this was a situation we didn’t see coming, and it scared me!

Thankfully we drove and drove and drove (for two hours) until we saw a big 18 wheeler full of hay bales and followed it for a couple miles through actual corn fields and someone’s personal property until we hit a road that would take us home. Whew. I don’t know what would have happened it we didn’t see that 18 wheeler. We were so far from where we originally started, and there was no way we were going to find our way back with no navigation and zero cell phone service in the pitch black. Scary, y’all!

And tragically, we never made it to the winery. 😉

But I didn’t share this with you guys because what was I going to say on Instagram about such a serious dilemma we were in? Seriously… why would I need to share that story? I was in tears and didn’t want to touch social media. This wasn’t funny or anything I even wanted to talk about.

Believe it or not, I actually don’t share our entire lives on the internet. 😉 I have always desired for this to be a happy place but also strive to find a balance in sharing our ups and downs. I blog because I am so passionate about writing, not because we have these perfect little lives that I feel like sharing.  I strive to be real and relatable and never paint a picture that we live our lives without hardships and struggles. We are so incredibly fortunate in so (!) many ways, but obviously we deal with our share of “junk” too that just isn’t always appropriate to share with strangers. You get it!

So anyway… I just wanted to share that sometimes social media is a liar. Maybe not a liar, but it can paint a picture that life is always happy. Sometimes I see things on social media that make me envious, but I have learned to tame that REAL QUICK because I know first-hand as a blogger and social media guru that sometimes there’s more to the story. This isn’t to say that people are trying to lie or cover up hardships. By posting our happy picture before the winery and then a picture of Sadie eating pancakes doesn’t make me a liar AT ALL. It just means that I’m sharing happy pictures as they happen. I have prayed for years that my readers understand that I’m human and have my fair share of “yuck” in my personal life too.

I just hope you know when you come to this site or my social media pages that I’m never trying to pull the wool over your eyes that our lives are perfect, or even better than yours. I’m sharing happy moments as they happen as well as ideas and stories that I pray spark inspiration and happy memories for your own families. And I hope you remember this when you scroll social media in general and see others’ highlight reels. They have their junk. And it’s okay that they’re not sharing it and it doesn’t make them a liar. It should be assumed that if you’re a human, you know that “life” happens to us all.

Just a reminder to take social media with a grain of salt. 🙂

Thanks for listening to me ramble! Just wanted to share. 🙂 LOVE YOU ALL and am so grateful for how you care about our family and keep up with us. I truly do love sharing it “all”. 🙂  xoxoxo