A very important key to maintaining your happiness, motivation, positive attitude, and overall mental health is surrounding yourself with people that ELEVATE you. They make you feel better about yourself, they challenge you to reach heights you’ve never been, and they remind you of all the ways you are blessed. It’s about them, but it is twice as much about you. This said, there’s as much responsibility on you to take what they post in a way that benefits you, if not more.
When I first got into social media (about 13 years ago, according to my Facebook memories), I was very hesitant. It was through these platforms that my friends discovered unfaithful spouses (do you remember myspace??). It was also because of these platforms that I started noticing trends of jealousy and unhappiness from people. After personally succumbing to it and finally making accounts of my own, I even fell for it myself – as a young mom, even though I was happily married and raising two beautiful and healthy boys, a post from my friends hanging out at a club could easily make me feel left out. It would make me feel jealous and unhappy.
What we don’t realize is that a post from me with my husband and my boys can conversely make those people feel like they’re behind, make them think about how they wish they had a family, and make them feel jealous and unhappy. Certainly, that’s not the purpose of sharing these posts. At least, it’s not my purpose nor my intent.
It took a while for me to take personal responsibility – it is up to me to take the positive out of people’s posts, rather than having them negatively affect me. Most importantly, it took a shift in my perspective to first be happy for them, to see what they had that I want for myself, and then to be motivated by them to seek those things for myself.
It’s easy to fall into the trap of comparing yourself to others. People try to make you (or themselves) feel better by explaining that social media only shows peoples’ “highlight reels.” They’re trying to say that peoples’ lives can’t be that good and that perfect all of the time. They can’t “relate” to these people because they don’t feel like it’s “real.”
And that’s understandable. People want to connect and this is the basis for social media. It’s supposed to be a way to network and find common ground. But it’s up to us to break the “misery loves company” mentality. Let’s create the “happiness loves company” mentality – let’s devote our posts to positive messages that bring hope to others. Heck, our posts should “challenge” others to rise up and go for what they deserve – if we can have something, they can, too! That’s what I started to see when I looked at other people’s posts – if they can do it, I can do it, too!
It’s a matter of where we exert our energy. For the sake of making my point, and for the only way some people can relate, yes, I have to deal with struggles, disappointments, and heartbreaks all of the time. Does that mean that I’m being unrealistic, unrelatable, and “fake” if I don’t post about these? Absolutely not. I’ve made it a personal mission to share and deliver messages of love, hope, and positivity to help and influence other people. I don’t share these things because the world needs more positivity. I share these things because the world needs to recognize there’s already plenty of it. They’re just distracted by the negative posts that I choose not to add to.
This is why I started the Delivering Love Project. There are so many ways to say “I love you” without using the words and, if I challenge you to recognize and deliver love every single day, by way of a journal entry or a post, I bet you’ll realize how wonderful this world really is and how blessed we truly are.
This said, I appreciate the posts that are not always so “positive”. It’s also a moral responsibility and a way of “looking after each other” to bring awareness into the world, and that is a positive thing 🙂
Don’t forget to recognize and deliver love today! ❤ G
F WORDS ARE MY FAVORITE 