Is Everyone Lying to Me?

Or are my expectations unrealistic?

Photo by Rod Long on Unsplash

Every few weeks, I delete Instagram. I tell myself it’s because of the time-suck. I open the app, I scroll for “just a few minutes” which somehow turns into an hour that I was going to spend reading before bed. My list of completed books stagnates, my sleep suffers, and within a few moments of my light going out, someone is going to wake up wailing for me.

But if I’m honest, it’s because every little upward swipe of my finger, every pause on a Reel, every click to a username to snoop around someone’s profile is germinating jealousy and discontent.

She’s funnier than me. She takes more care of her appearance than I do. She lost the baby weight and kept it off. She makes money from her social media and doesn’t work. She thinks of fun activities for her kids and they do them without whining. She disciplines gently and authoritatively and her kids listen the first time. She bought just the right bins for organizing her house and no corner of it is a Chaos Zone strewn with plastic Penguin Pile-Up figures waiting to impale someone’s foot in the middle of the night.

And, when I’m feeling particularly bad about myself, the jealousy takes a darker turn: She’s probably lying about all that anyway.

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As the Winter Olympics unfold, I’ve watched bits and snippets of premier athletes on social media Reels. The figure skaters are my favorite– so fluid, so graceful, absolutely effortless. I can’t ice skate at all. I probably never will.

But when I look at Kaori Sakamoto or Ilia Malinin on the ice, I don’t feel overcome by envy of what they can do. It wouldn’t cross my mind to assume they’re faking their achievements. Because I’m so far removed from the world of ice dancing, it doesn’t occur to me to feel as if I’m not measuring up to them. I’m not a skater and I likely never will be; I’m okay with that.

But as a mom, watching other moms of young children succeed in areas where I think I’ve failed is a lot harder to reconcile.