To All Facebook Users

All too often I hear from someone who is discouraged because he or she thinks so many other people on Facebook have sweet, perfect lives, filled with perfect relationships and endless opportunities for fun.

So it seems when we just post our best. This isn’t wrong. It’s fine to focus on the good things in our lives. Certainly it is healthy, and dwelling on the good enables us to notice and create more of it. But to those who don’t feel they are where they want to be, whether in challenging relationships or struggling with financial or health concerns, life isn’t like those posts on Facebook.

Life is messy, with all the highs and lows imaginable. Everyone has had struggles, failed relationships, frightening times, worried times, and pain that we can’t see. Almost all of us have lost loved ones, seen loved ones go to war, get ill or battle depression, if not ourselves.

This life includes a huge diversity of experiences. It holds amazing and wonderful things for all of us, but no one is excluded from the pain.
Know that the brave woman posting pictures of her happy, cherished children could be still feeling lost without her husband. The man with the perfect marriage may be facing a life threatening illness, or the young woman celebrating a move to another state may have just been rejected by the one she thought was the love of her life.

We are all in this glorious, chaotic, confusing, remarkable, muddled, and astonishing experience we call life. No one is exempt. We’re in this together. The strength of human kind is the incredibly powerful love we feel for one another, and we see it spread through Facebook too.