Meeting Ourselves Where We Are At

And Holding Onto Our Glimmers

20 May 2024

We are busy. We’ve all got super long to-do lists to tick off, bills to pay, relationships to work on, kids and pets to keep alive and nurtured, dinner to make every single day… so many things! Then we are bombarded daily by the many things we are not managing to get around to the latest fitness trend, surefire money-making side hustles, cookery courses, youth regenerating beauty regimes and diets, the myriad of expensive but must-do self-care hobbies, influencing social media like a boss. It can be exhausting living in this digital age, where if we are not careful, we can get swept into feeling like we are not doing enough, or even worse, that we are not enough.

Keeping Up With The Joneses

This isn’t a new phenomenon unique to the digital age, however. ‘Keeping up with the Joneses’ has long been a common saying, highlighting the pressure people have felt to keep up financially or materialistically with their friends and neighbours. According to Collins Dictionary:

“If you say that someone is keeping up with the Joneses, you mean that they are doing something in order to show that they have as much money as other people, rather than because they really want to do it.”

People got themselves into debt to try to ‘keep up’ because they did not feel good enough.

The unrelenting wide reach of digital media makes the modern age even trickier for people, especially with the rise of social media. We see celebrity influencers and even our friends’ social feeds with carefully curated pictures and videos that create the impression that their lives are infinitely more exciting and less problematic than our own. We see what we’re missing out on, what we’re not doing enough of, where we are not excelling. Everyone else appears to be thriving while we are barely surviving and it can make us feel a little bit crap about ourselves, a little bit less than.

Yes, some of these people we see really are thriving and what we see may well be their reality, but no doubt many have the extra help and support or even luck needed to thrive. However, we are only seeing part of the story. Some may also have a story to tell of overcoming tough times, if only we knew, we would wish them well and have no envy. Of course, a great majority of people construct a narrative on social media that differs to their actual reality. Often they are juggling and struggling as much as the rest of us, but if you were to look at their feed, you would swear they had everything under control, they did loads of fun activities, it never rained, their house was always tidy, and the cost of living crisis wasn’t affecting them in any way.

Meet Yourself Where You Are At

Max Ehrmann puts it nicely in his popular poem Desiderata:

“If you compare yourself with others, you may become vain or bitter, for always there will be greater and lesser persons than yourself.”

We have to try to forget about what others are doing, whether it’s real or fake and just concentrate on meeting ourselves where we are right now without judgment. Remember the struggles we have already overcome, what we are currently overcoming. Celebrate the things we have already achieved, are currently achieving and plan to achieve in the future, no matter how small or big we perceive them to be.

You Are Worthy

Whatever is going on for you, remember you are still worthy. Crushing goals doesn’t just mean running three marathons in three months or starting a side hustle that pays for an amazing holiday that you can vlog to your one hundred thousand YouTube subscribers. If your goal is to get out of bed for an hour but your body says nope, or to answer that text message from over a week ago, and you manage it, then you too are crushing goals.

And if you don’t manage it, it doesn’t matter, the main goal is not to beat yourself up and crush your spirit. You are human, you have hard stuff going on that other people don’t understand/see/care/ask about. Despite everything you are still here, surviving each day. You are strong, valued and worthy of love- especially your own.

You are worthy exactly as you are!

Hold Onto The Glimmers