Instagram vs. reality: part one

I’m not adding anything new to the dialogue when I say that Instagram can be pretty fake. Even worse is the #travelgram. And yet who hasn’t found themselves on their couch, scrolling, jealous of someone’s amazing travel posts? We’ve all seen the cliche, visually-stunning travel pics. The prayer/yoga pose in front of a South Asian temple #blessed. A beach or infinity pool picture with the subject wearing a sun hat you could never pull off and a swimsuit that’s way cuter than your Target clearance find #takemeback. A flatlay of a crisp white tablecloth, a little cup of espresso, and an enviable breakfast spread that is much cooler than the microwaved oatmeal you ate out of a tupperware container #praguemornings.

You wonder… how the hell did they afford that vacation?

And as for those travel influencers you wonder… are they just running around from cafe to yoga class to the beach with nothing but #gratitude all the time? Trust me, there’s a lot more to their lives than what we see on their carefully curated, filtered, hashtagged feeds. It’s important to remember that travel is an #industry. If they’re an influencer or an advertiser, they’re trying to convince you that you need to buy their product or experience to be happy.

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Times of my life. 🥂 I think the sky must love me back equally as I love it, I could stare at it forever. 🌅 ✨ #greece #infinitypool #life #sky #love

A post shared by LARA | Travel | Love (@your_passport) on Oct 23, 2018 at 12:26pm PDT

No shade… but… ARE YOU KIDDING ME?! Girl can’t even reach those snacks without making that wedgie worse. #life

Those gorgeous international vacations may also involve getting lost, anxiety attacks on airplanes, sore bodies and blisters, travel constipation, not being able to sleep in your new surroundings, fighting with your family/travel companions, spending way more money than you budgeted for, crying in train stations, running out of potable water, being extremely lonely if you have no travel companions, or accidentally ordering fish eggs because you couldn’t really read the menu then getting lost in the desert and having diarrhea next to a cactus (thanks fish eggs) and using your useless map as toilet paper #fisheggcactuspoop.

I only throw this out there because we’re ALL susceptible to comparing our real lives to peoples’ Instagram lives. We have to make a conscious effort to stop comparing if we find ourselves constantly coming up short or nurturing resentment and jealousy.

I posted some pretty scenery pictures and a few attempts at witty captions on my Instagram during my first few months in Guatemala. The reality you don’t see? I’m actually not on vacation and I’ve had a lot of challenges. I talked to a friend back home on the phone and she said, “wow I guess I’ve only seen your Instagram and I had no idea you were struggling!”

Of course it’s not all bad. There’s a lot to love about Guatemala and the adventure of being in a new country. But I feel prompted to be a little more honest and vulnerable about the tough stuff. We all want to be seen and known. So maybe this is my attempt to be seen, and because I really want people to know that it’s OKAY if your life feels like a total shit show. I feel ya. Props to you for showing up anyway!

So here’s the first in what will be a series of posts breaking down #InstagramVsReality:

https://www.instagram.com/p/BnMvFK3n4Z0/?utm_source=ig_web_button_share_sheet

What you don’t see:

• I didn’t sleep well for a month because I was being eaten alive by bed bugs at night. At first I was nervous to tell my host family because I didn’t want them to be offended/embarrassed. But even after I worked up the courage to tell them, the bugs kept biting as we tried every home remedy we could think of to kill them. I had hundreds of painfully itchy bites on my legs, stomach, arms, neck, and hands.
• My acne also started getting worse despite my best efforts to control it. So I basically looked like a leper and was feeling very uncomfortable in my skin. My host family kept insisting that I get a steroid injection from the 15 year old pharmacist for my bug bites, and I had to keep coming up with excuses to avoid it. They eventually opted for the natural remedy which involved burning me in the temescal/Mayan sauna, dousing me with hot salt water, and hitting me with leaves (tbh I love the temescal, but it took me a little while to get used to it.)
• My host family experienced a tragic loss and everyone was too sad to buy groceries or eat. I didn’t want to be a jerk and eat food in front of them while they weren’t eating. Also getting fresh produce can involve a half-day trip to another town and sometimes I am just too lazy to do that. So basically I was very hungry, tired, and itchy for the entire month of September.
• At one point that damn horse took off running (galloping?) and went right for a low-hanging tree branch and I was v close to being decapitated.
• There were a lot of other emotional/relational/professional struggles … but this is getting long so maybe those will come up in a future #InstagramVsReality post.

I’m not sharing this so that people will feel bad for me. I just want to remind you that Instagram is not reality. Don’t compare your complex, wild, unique, challenging whole self to the over-simplified, filtered, one-dimensional Instagram self everyone else is presenting online. We’ve all got our issues and insecurities, and people who travel a lot don’t just magically leave them behind. You never know what someone is going through based on their social media posts. So be kind to yourself, then extend that grace to others. And beware of horses who try to run you into trees and just lay down whenever they feel like it regardless of if there is a human in the saddle.