A creative lifestyle blog.

Tuesday 4 August 2015

PINTEREST VS REALITY.


Today I wanted to discuss a bit of a strange topic with you, the idea of Pinterest VS reality. I am guessing that most of my blog readers are active on Pinterest based on the content that I share so I hope I am not alone in this feeling. The feeling that you whatever you create just isn't good enough, especially compared to Pinterest. I decided to use this image of my birthday cake from last week as a prime example of this. 

It is clear to see from my blog that I really enjoy baking so it seemed like an obvious progression for me to bake my own birthday cake. In my mind, I had aspirations of a beautiful pink 3 tier ombre cake. I have made many a cake in my time so I thought nothing of it at first and whipped up my go-to Victoria sponge mix before mixing up 3 different types of butter cream icing. The cake itself was a success but the icing, oh the icing. If it wasn't bad enough that it somehow split leaving a bitty weird texture the entire thing was basically slipping right off my perfectly baked cake. 

After an hour or so of baking in my tiny apartment kitchen with the oppressive summer heat and an absolute cake fail in front of me I genuinely got quite emotional and felt both equally annoyed and upset. A given I was baking for a specific event and I am sure the stress of that was probably what made me feel that way, but I just couldn't help but compare my cake fail to all the beautiful cakes on Pinterest and just feel like I wasn't good enough.

After an hour or so of wallowing in self-pity I decided to take a trip to my local supermarket and see what birthday cakes they had available. To my absolute surprise I walked down the baking aisle and right in front of me was a 3 tier pink ombre cake covered in roses! In the end I didn't even care that I hadn't baked the cake myself and neither did any of my guests. A great time was had by all and that's all that really matters. A part of me is like, ah you could have tried again and not given up after the first shot, but at the same time, it was my birthday and I just couldn't be bothered with all this additional stress I was putting myself under.

Pinterest VS reality even goes deeper than that, to be honest I think its more the internet VS reality these days. I think that as humans we are always hard on ourselves and jealousy and comparison are only natural but I often wonder if the internet is just making everything worse. Social media is a great thing, it allows us to connect with people all over the world by just a click of a button. However just like traditional media has done for years I feel that social media is now putting so much pressure on people to appear as thought they have the perfect life.  

I can quite easily take at least 50 photographs of a subject before picking 1 specific image to share because I enjoy photography and styling but then I often worry that I am also making someone feel that way? Am I supposed to take the first shot and roll with it or am I supposed to aim for perfection? It's a tricky one to balance but for me it's all about looking past the Instagram filter or the perfect cake and remembering that real people, with real problems, and real lives made that and they too have off days where their cakes look like the Pink Panther has been melted in a microwave. 

I guess what I am trying to say in a round about way is, stop comparing yourself to others, work on improving yourself for you and for nobody else, especially not just for a re-pin or a like on Pinterest. 
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2 comments

  1. I can relate to this completely! Sometimes, I'm taking an Instagram shot that looks all neat at natural and pretty, but in reality everything outside that perfect square is a complete mess. Great post and I totally agree with the message <3

    Sophie | www.dreamsandcolourschemes.com

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