Your Life Will Never Be A Highlight Reel (And That’s Okay)

The stuff we post on social media, the stories we tell our friends, the hype we build around certain events, are mostly fake. We exaggerate, edit out the bad or uninteresting parts of our lives, and live too much in the moment because we know deep down that we aren’t as interesting as we would like to be.

But that’s okay. No one’s life is a highlight reel. Everyone has bad days. Everyone has lazy days and don’t exhaust too much of their energy to impress others or even themselves. If you had the possibility to track everyone’s daily life, it would hit you that everyone is kind of boring. We all have similar experiences in life.

We all experience love.

We all experience heartbreak.

We all have dreams.

We all have to overcome adversity in very dark moments.

We are all treated unfairly at some point in our lives.

We all have to say goodbye to things that we really don’t want to see go.

Yet we feel that other people’s relationships are worth exploring and exploiting. When it’s really none of our business. Everyone feels like they should share their love stories, their dreams, and their best qualities. These are the things that many people highlight. It’s hard to blame them because it’s kind of become the norm. How many people care about what your biggest fears are? Compare this to how many people care about comparing your life to their own.

We’re all so focused on being the best and making our lives memorable not just for ourselves, but for everyone else. The highlight reel doesn’t define you. It’s how you respond to the hard times in life.

It’s the moments when you feel like giving up. It’s when you work so hard, but you feel like no one recognizes or appreciates your hard work and loyalty. It’s the days where you reconsider what you’re striving for. It’s the days where you question whether you should be putting so much time and energy into your work. Those are the moments that really define you.

The best part about all of that is that you have a choice. If you do give up, let go, and move on, then I hope that’s one of the best decisions you ever make in your life. And if you decide to just keep grinding away because you feel that one day your hard work will be worth it, then I truly hope it is. Those are the moments that should be highlighted.

The mornings you woke up after balling your eyes out because of a bad breakup are the moments you should be proud of.

The days you look yourself in the mirror and decide that you’re good enough even though you’ve been told otherwise are the moments you should be proud of.

The days you decided you wouldn’t let your setbacks define your progress are the moments you should be proud of.

We should be taking more pride in the fact that we’ve been through so much shit and decide to keep moving forward. We have a choice to not continue and let our failures define us. And sometimes that’s not a bad thing. Our lives are not the highlight reels that we pretend to display. All of the other highlight reels on social media are fake. They’re edited, and the creator has the choice on what to publish and what not to publish. The wild stories our friends tell us are probably fake as well. Storytellers tend to exaggerate their stories, and the storyteller gets to decide what stays in the story, and what stays out of the story.

The highlights are a nice reminder that things can go right, but what we need to remember is how we always got back up to make those highlights happen.