Gratitude. What an amazing word. We could all use a little more of this. I am very guilty of this. I concentrate on what is wrong rather then what is right. I want a perfect picture life. That just is not possible but how do I change that perspective? I think gratitude is the key. Possibly making a list of all the good things will shine the light on what is right in my life. Happiness can come from imperfection.

My picture perfect life is what I strife for, what I want to be my reality, what I feel I fall short of and what causes me great pain. I want things to be as I imagine they should be.

Pictures show a moment but although that “moment” might look perfect it is not reality. Pictures are deceiving and do not show the “background”. With social media there are so many picture perfect moments being shared but are those photographs depictions of reality? Those pictures show us smiling families that look absolutely happy and content. Believe me when I say you might take 100 shots to get one that looks like that. If we saw the other 99 our impression would be totally different.

We live in a world where it’s possible to crop and filter out the parts of our lives we don’t others to see. It’s possible to project an image of ourselves and our family that is very far from our personal reality. This is what the reality of social media is, but it’s not true reality. So the reality we see on social media is not how life truly is but when we look at it we process it as being so. I used “reality” too many times in this paragraph. I probably need an editor or something.

Anyway, all this filtering and projecting creates a situation where we compare real lives to other people’s filtered ones. This is what cause depression, shame and also the desire to make our lives perfect too. We will always come up short. We need to understand that this is us, we are not perfect and that needs to be OK.

This is where I think Gratitude comes into play. How can we be happy in our lives despite the fact that we are all “imperfect” or don’t fit into the “social ideal”? We need to be grateful for what we do have in our lives. We need to live in our own reality and not try to fit into what we believe is the best reality. We need to be grateful.

I struggle with this every day. I want to “fix” relationships that I honestly have no control over but that would make my “picture” more perfect. What I do have is a family of imperfect people who may not always get along, might not speak to each other for periods of time, but they are all people who deep down love one another unconditionally. If anyone falters there will always be someone there to pick them up. So I guess I can say my family is perfectly imperfect and that needs to be enough.