A lot of my daily attention and energy is directed toward various forms of social media, and I could write a novel about how much of a time waster those tools can be. Thankfully, other people have already tackled that subject, and it’s not my intent to guilt anyone about how much time you spend on the internet (at least not in this blog post.) However, I have spent a lot of time lately pondering how to be genuine and encouraging in my use of Facebook and Instagram, specifically. I’m an editor by trade, so I naturally limit my posts to the aspects of my day that I feel are worthy of being widely and permanently shared. There’s an ongoing discussion about how social media does not tell the whole story of a person’s life and to judge your success against someone else’s newsfeed is not only damaging, it’s also ridiculous. As a young mom, my days literally contain a lot of human waste. And diaper changes don’t get posted to my Instagram account. Neither do the arguments with my hyper-verbal four-year-old. It doesn’t usually occur to me in the middle of cleaning up yet another cup of spilled milk to snap an artistically framed picture of the mess.

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