#ShareDontCompare Challenge: What You See Versus The Real Me

by Annabelle Parr

Scrolling through social media, it’s easy to get the impression that everyone has it all together except for you. Our minds are saturated with images of everyone we know looking perpetually happy: picturesque vacations, adorable smiling kids and parents looking at ease, major accomplishments, lovey dovey relationships, weddings, birthdays, sunsets and puppies. The best, shiniest moments of everyone’s life are at our fingertips, with the all the messy, painful, and dull moments conveniently filtered out.

It’s easy to compare our realities to the perfectly manicured and carefully curated lives we see on Instagram and Facebook. And when we compare our lives to those we see on social media, we might think we are the only ones feeling anxious, lonely, depressed, stressed, or burnt out. We think we must be the only ones who lose our patience from time to time, the only ones who have days that aren’t quite so picture perfect.

Yet part of being human is to experience pain. Furthermore, we can’t truly experience joy to the fullest if we are not also willing to experience the flip side – grief, fear, sadness, anger. When we try to avoid the painful stuff, we also numb ourselves from feeling the full extent of the happy, triumphant stuff, and our lives get smaller and smaller as they become centered around avoiding the emotions we don’t want to have.

But social media – and even just going about our lives day to day, with “how are you?”s followed by the knee-jerk “I’m good”s – can give us the impression that the human experience is one sided, isolating us when we need connection the most. Our pain can become compounded by our harsh assessment that we are alone in our experience. Our minds may make up stories about how we should be, how we are not good enough, and how if we are just hard enough on ourselves, maybe we could get it together.

What if instead of believing that we are the problem for experiencing life as messy and complex, we were willing to share those moments with each other? What if, rather than covering up our struggles, we shared them in service of connection? It is wonderful to have a platform to share our joy because those moments deserve to be celebrated. And what might it be like if we could also connect in compassion when we are struggling? What if our social media feeds both reminded us of the joy in life and also reminded us that we are not alone in the pain?

In the service of countering the social comparison phenomenon and facilitating a sense of common humanity – that we all experience the full range of emotion – we are starting the #ShareDontCompare Challenge on social media. Our goal is to inspire each other to share a more whole and well-rounded picture of life as we experience it – shiny stuff and messy stuff all intertwined. To participate, take a video of yourself with the following script, filling it in with your own experience:

“Hi I’m [NAME] and I’m doing the Share Don’t Compare Challenge to shed light on the real experience of being a human being beyond all that shiny stuff you see on social media. So, what you see is [fill in the blank with something people see on social media]. The real me [fill in the blank with something vulnerable that you would like to share but don’t typically]. So that's me. I’d like nominate [NAME AND TAG TWO PEOPLE] to do the Share Don’t Compare Challenge. Spread the word, nominate 2 friends, share on social media, and add the hashtags #sharedontcompare and #therealme.”

Sharing our difficult moments helps us all to know that to struggle does not make us inadequate – it is actually a key part of what makes us beautiful.  

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