Featured Image Credit: Fengyou Wan on Unsplash
There is pressure in society to be perfect, to achieve some lofty goal. This pressure leads to the Insta-gratification of the world today.
This phenomenon is not new. The only difference is the platform.
Keeping up with the Jones is a common phrase in the financial community. It easily predates social media. Keeping up with the Jones refers to the desire for people to keep up appearances with their neighbors.
You visit your friend who bought a new big-screen TV, so you buy one yourself. Another associate of yours purchases a new, sleek sports car. You attempt to match it.
The keep-up mentality is a need to project a specific type of life. To show others how well you are doing.
People would also project a perfect family life. Never speak of struggles or openly admit any issue.
Instagram and Facebook are a forum to demonstrate our perfect lives.
So, perfection projects around us. Then we think we are the ones with the issue if our life is imperfect.
I am here to tell you it is okay to have struggles. No one is perfect, but everyone is too afraid to show their imperfections. We work hard to project life to inspire jealousy but only project our true desires onto the world.
Whenever you find yourself struggling, bear these things in mind.
Accept the Struggle
Acknowledge and embrace your struggles. You don’t have to like them, but you must accept them. Understand it is normal to struggle with mental health. It is normal to struggle with a job or a business.
It is entirely normal to question your decisions and second-guess yourself.
Two years before releasing The Grapes of Wrath, American Author John Steinbeck had doubts. He claimed, “I am not a writer. I’ve been fooling myself and other people.” In a journal entry.
He later won the Pulitzer Prize for The Grapes of Wrath.
Tina Fey, most known for Saturday Night Live and 30 Rock, believed she was a fraud. That people would discover she didn’t belong.
Many people go through bouts of wondering if they belong. Often they feel as though they don’t have the talent and will be discovered. This type of doubt is more common than you might think.
Acknowledge your struggles, then push through them.
Share the Struggle
I did spend several paragraphs saying it, but it is true. You may or may not be surprised to learn others struggle. Moreover, there are people you’ve never met who could benefit from your story.
Sharing the struggle shows others who feel alone that they are not alone. Just saying people are struggling doesn’t make it accurate in a person’s mind unless they can confirm it.
By sharing your burden, you allow others to learn from your mistakes. You can also allow others who’ve struggled to share some guidance with you.
There is also relief from not carrying around these issues alone.
Sometimes it can seem the better course of action is to keep the pain and suffering to ourselves. There is freedom, not hiding but sharing it with others.
One Moment at a Time
Life is rarely the same; it gets messy. You may fail in a goal. You run into roadblock after obstacle after struggle and can find a way through. Movies always clean up the mess and wrap things up in a nice tidy bow.
In real life, you’ve tried every approach. You’ve exhausted all of the options.
Keep working through it. Keep creating new potential solutions.
It is cliché to say keep working through the pain, but sometimes the little and big things become cumulative.
Stay diligently working through the struggle. The death of a loved one, losing money in a business, losing a job. There are thousands of ways we struggle.
Just take it all one day, one event, one piece at a time. Slow down and focus on what lies in front of you.
Limiting our attention keeps our minds from wandering.
What’s Next?
The images people project are often far from the whole story. We all have moments of struggle and failure. It’s okay. The struggle is what makes success feel so much more euphoric.
Accept your struggle. Don’t deny where you are but always look forward. You may be broke or in debt or at a dead-end job. Whatever your situation, you always have an opportunity to improve.
Don’t be afraid to share the struggle. Others may find inspiration and comfort in your story. You may find others who can help you as well.
Take every situation a moment at a time. Thinking too far ahead in a stressful situation can be overwhelming. Instead, take each situation a moment at a time.
Don’t be afraid of being vulnerable. Everyone has issues. We are all human, and some do better hiding it than others.
You don’t have to share every detail with everyone but never feel that struggling makes you less.
This is only one chapter in your novel. Anything can happen before the end.