Author Archive | Doña

Last week, while scrolling through Facebook’s news feed on my iPhone while my toddler was momentarily occupied with something, I followed a link to an article on Relevant Magazine titled “Stop Instagramming Your Perfect Life.” The article is about the idea that everyone’s life is prettier on the internet, which both makes us individually feel bad and makes the building of true community – based on real lives, real voices and shared experiences – difficult or impossible to build. The author calls the internet a “partial truth.” This line, in particular, has stuck with me: “…we rarely check Facebook when we’re having our own peak experiences. We check it when we’re bored and when we’re lonely, and it intensifies that boredom and loneliness.”

It is true.

I’m well aware of how easy it is to fall into comparison mode on the internet. It is hard, as a blogger, to look at other blogs with large engaged communities and not feel like a lame beginner (while overlooking the hard work and time that blogger put in to get there).  It is hard as a writer to see polished essays go viral (without remembering how many rounds of edits and rewrites that essay probably took to polish).  It is hard as a creative person to see others churning out cute outfits for their kids, throwing lavish parties or making pretty gifts (without remembering there is likely a mess outside the frame of the photo and that this person likely has help in a variety of ways to make time for their creativity).  It is hard as a mother to see photos of clean-scrubbed, well-behaved, adorable kids in beautiful settings (while forgetting we are all unlikely to photograph, let alone share, photos of tantrums).…