Sunday, February 21, 2016

Don't Apologize

I love the internet. I love the connections it gives us to other people. I'm not sure what pressure was like before the internet. I experienced high school and college pressure before social media. However, honestly I don't really feel like those pressures ever really phased me much. Maybe because those that knew me knew I was going to do what I was going to do. When I wanted to do it. They accepted that and loved me anyway. Hopefully your closest friends and family were the same too. However, in our social media world we are exposed to the influences of more than just those in our closest inner circle.

We are now exposed to a whole new level of pressure in all the aspects of how we live our life from anyone and everyone we've ever known because we are now virtually connected to not just our closest friends but all those we've met along the way.  There's pressure in where our career should rank in our list of priorities, where exercise should rank in our list of priorities, pressure on what our eating habits should be, pressure on how we should be raising our kids, pressure on what our goals and ambitions should be, pressure on what our marriage should be like, pressure on everything you can probably think of, pressure on what we do with our spare time, pressure on what happiness should look like.  If we let ourselves think too much on it we could totally convince ourselves we're living our life all wrong.

If we're not convinced we're living it all wrong we feel the need to apologize for how we do live our life. We feel the need to apologize for sharing too many pictures of our kids, for making time for ourselves and our interests, for sharing our journeys with our health, struggles, or personal goals and ambitions, apologize for shouting our happiness to the virtual world in hopes of spreading more positivity than negativity for a change, for sharing our views on delicate issues in hopes of convincing someone to look at an issue with a new perspective.

We need to be able to look at other's journeys and be happy for one another because we all have different struggles and triumphs that we will encounter. Different things will fulfill each of us. Each of our vision of happiness is different than everyone else's. What is important to you is not important to me. What is important to me is not important to you. And that is okay. We don't need to apologize for what makes us different. We don't need to apologize for what we choose to dedicate our time and resources to. We don't need to apologize for how we choose to live our life and we need to know there are many right ways to live this life. There is no one right or perfect way to live this life. Our journeys aren't about someone else or about making someone else feel bad about their life choices. It should be about celebrating the victory in ours so let's not apologize for what we choose to share or the choices we make in how we choose to live.



                                     Don't apologize for the victorious or the failing moments.
PS I'm not going to apologize for my picture sharing obsession anymore :)





 

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