my pinterest, my self?

Guten Tag, Y’all! (As you can see, I’m slowly getting back to my blogging duties, and man does it feel good. Although I may bore you for a few weeks, as Baby Z and I don’t get out much, so I don’t have many cool pictures of Germany to show you. Nevertheless, I won’t leave you high and dry! So today, we’ll talk about something that’s tangentially related to life as an expat–the idea vs. the reality.) Most of you probably know that I’m really into social media–on any given day, you can probably find me tweeting, pinning or ‘gramming. I even worked as social media manager before I moved to Europe. But what you probably don’t know is what really got me into social media. It’s kinda strange, but…breastfeeding. Yep. Back in 2009, found myself with a newborn baby boy. When he wasn’t sleeping, he was eating; this often meant that I was awake at midnight with no one to talk to and nothing to do but wait for the Babycakes to go back to sleep. Now, I’m the type of person who can’t just sit with nothing to read. Since I didn’t believe in e-books back then, I fired up my BlackBerry and decided to revisit this app I’d installed and ignored. It was called Twitter. Those feeding time tweets led to my job as a social media editor, new friendships, and eventually to the creation of this blog. Fast forward to 2014. During my pregnancy, I found myself too mentally exhausted (from learning German and from, ya know, growing a baby) to do the sort of creative writing that I loved. But I did have enough energy to be bored. Another semi-neglected (on my part) social network came to the rescue–this time, it was Pinterest.

If you don’t know, Pinterest is a platform that turns you into a digital hoarder allows you to collect images of things that inspire you. Before I was pregnant, I’d use Pinterest sporadically, mostly pinning pictures of pretty clothes or MTV Cribs style houses for a few days, then forgetting about them.

But y’all! Somewhere around the second trimester, I became a Pinterest junkie! All those pretty pictures are like crack. I started pinning more clothes I wanted (most of which I couldn’t fit into, and at the moment, still can’t). Then I started finding clothes for the Babycakes. Then the man. Of course, I had to start an inspiration board for Baby Z’s nursery. From there, it was an easy leap to starting up a board called Apartment Makeover–we already had to turn a room into a nursery, and since I was in nesting mode, why not just redo the whole apartment?

I’ve even got a board dedicated to my life here in Germany. The cover photo is my own pretty picture, of me in my wedding dress standing in front of a castle with my hot, hot husband. It’s pretty fairy tale-esque, I gotta say.

It was sometime during this pinning frenzy that I started to see articles about women who feel bad because their lives are not “Pinterest-worthy.” They log onto the Internet to read lifestyle blogs whose glossy images populate the boards on Pinterest, then they log off feeling bad about themselves. There are even blogs that exist solely to complain about bloggers whose lives seem to perfect! The comments sections are filled with readers who commiserate. Like, “Pinterest stress” is really a thing. To that I say…bless their little hearts. The Internet–and glossy images–have been around long enough for folks to know that what you see is the tip of the proverbial iceberg. It’s not the whole picture, so take it should be taken with a grain of salt. But I think this is something that grown folks should know. I love showing the fun things about being an expat–traveling to cool places, experiencing new cultures, meeting people from all over the world–but I don’t think I have to remind y’all that this is only the highlight reel. Life is just as messy as my living room, which is currently filled with unfolded laundry. That’s why I don’t take Pinterest too seriously. It’ fun and it’s useful, but at the end of the day it’s just a bunch of (staged) pretty pictures. Does my apartment look like the inspiration images I’ve collected? Kind of, when it’s clean. Did those blueberry muffins I make come out beautiful and delicious? No. They were terrible. Am I gonna feel like a failure every time I open Pinterest now? Nein, shawty. Because while I love looking at, and maybe even aspire to attain the lifestyle represented in my collection of pins, I respect the fact that there’s generally a big difference between the aspirational and the actual. In fact, I like it that way: even though it’s sometimes fruitless, pursuit of the aspirational is one of the things that makes life interesting. Just ask my homie Paulo. So I tend to be dissmissive of folks who say Pinterest makes them feel bad, but maybe I’m being too harsh. What do you guys think? Does Pinterest (or any other social network) make you feel inadequate? Should I post a disclaimer to my Germany board, letting people know my aim is to inspire them? Let’s talk about it.

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