“You can’t be good at everything!”

My mom has said this to me my whole life and I am glad she has!  You cannot be good at everything, but you can try your hardest in all that you do.

This week has been very difficult for me and I have appreciated reading some very honest blogs whose authors have described some of their struggles.  I don’t do this to make myself feel better because I think their lives suck and mine is better.  On the contrary, these people seem to be content and their acknowledgement of imperfection puts things in perspective for me.  I don’t believe that I could handle some of the things others struggle with, but I know that there are many that wouldn’t do too well with my trials.  Everyone experiences different challenges in life.  No one is good at everything and life is not completely easy for anyone…no matter how their blogs or tweets might make it seem. 

The internet touts perfection.  We tell ourselves: with all the knowledge available, there is no reason to not know the answer to something; with all the beautiful imagery (often created by others) on PInterest and Tumblr, there is no reason to not have it be a part of our electronic personas, even if we’ve never bought an Hermes scarf or baked puff pastries filled with french truffles snuffed out by free range pigs or lived in an all-white modern cottage with Polaroids taped in a grid on a chalkboard wall.  While I do enjoy fashion from the runway and beautiful pictures of food and homes on occasion, I’m really perusing the internet in search of personal anecdotes and real life. And no, it doesn’t always have to be tragic. I love reading about people’s funny/awkward/other moments on Twitter, because isn’t the point of social media to connect with others through your reality?  I feel like the majority of people using these tools are just recycling content to create a perception that their lives actually reflect this visual collective of others’ work.

Now, more than ever, I think it is important to be OK with imperfection. I worry that our generation fears this, along with failure. So they don’t even try to become their own person.  They just latch onto the “perfection” of others.  Failure doesn’t necessarily mean falling off the deep end and becoming a crack whore, but if that’s where you been and you’re trying to do better, I might just enjoy reading about it. But please, stop hiding your insecurities behind an endless series of meaningless, often unaccompanied by actual words (other than “OMG, I love this!”), photographs of products and places that you’re probably never going to call your own.