What My Instagram Doesn’t Tell You.

So once upon a time (or in 1837) to be exact, this guy named Louis Daguerre invented the first semi-practical camera. And that was the beginning of it all.

At first, photographs were so difficult to take that only royalty could afford such a luxury. These photographs were used solely for historical purposes. No one had millions of photographs all over their houses. But then of course it began to evolve. As the photography process got simpler, more and more people were able to benefit from it.

And now here were are, able to take photographs from many different devices. We can print them, post them, and send them from our email through the abyss to someone else’s email. It’s unbelievable isn’t it?

I love pictures. I’m not always so good at remembering to take them, but I love looking back on the most perfect moments of my life and remembering. That’s usually what we take pictures of, isn’t it? The perfect moments, the smiling moments, the moments we never want to forget.

Thanks to modern technology, many of our relationships are based on pictures. How many friends from high school and college do you rarely talk to, but follow on social media through their pictures? For me, it’s a whole lot. It’s pretty incredible actually.

But I think that we forget sometimes that they’re just pictures.

We forget that nobody is posting on Instagram the angle that highlights that zit on their chin, or the pictures of their children throwing a tantrum at the grocery store. We just don’t. We like to capture the moments we want to remember.

My Instagram is a sea of pictures of Max (my apologies to all who follow me), with the occasional photo of Eric and I, usually looking our best and properly edited. Nothing wrong with that, right? But there’s a lot of other stuff to our life too.

I’m not taking pictures of the hard days, the ones that make me want to crawl back into bed. I’m not grabbing a selfie while Eric and I are deep in a heated argument. I’m not posting pictures of myself mid panic attack.

Pictures are not a full representation of anyones life. They just aren’t.

And I think that we forget that.

We look at other people’s lives through pictures and it feels like our lives suck. Like we’ve missed the perfect train that everyone else is riding.

Sometimes we just need to take a breath and remember that real lives are happening behind those pictures of real people, flawed as us.

Though pictures may not always show it, life is pretty messy for all of us.

So the next time you see a picture of someone else’s life that makes you feel inferior, remember, that it is just a picture, and they are just a person.