I understand that many bloggers like to keep their blogs as their 'happy place'. They feel that the good memories are the ones worth recording and their blogs reflect that. I get it, sort of.
But in a lot of ways, I can get a big slap of 'happy place' from women's magazines, where newborns are all 'angels' and celebpretties wax lyrical about their tiny thighs and enormous meals. The same women's magazines that made me feel like a fat loser all through teenagedom and an even fatter loser after that.
A loser because I didn't have a boyfriend. A loser because I didn't have straight hair. A loser because I couldn't afford designer clothes, a personal trainer, a salon wax, frosted tips or, during the early nineties, Hammer pants. A loser because... well, I was me.
Easy solution: I stopped buying those stupid mags in my late twenties and never really looked back. Oh, okay, I swapped my addiction to women's mags for my addiction to house porn, but you've gotta start somewhere right? See, now I'm just a loser because of my house. It's not really about me any more.
Intellectually I'm aware that those house porn mags 'fake it' (loving the connotations attached to that sentence!). Intellectually I know that they back the truck up full of the latest and greatest and practically shove the featured family out of the way to create their 'styled casual' home for them. But emotionally, I'm attached to that idea of 'the perfect family home' that looks like that all the time. Emotionally I believe that there are families out there that live with all-white furnishings that stay white; that their children's toys are only made of wooden and recycled tyres. Families that exist in colour-coordinated clothes that don't clash with their smearless red Smeg fridge and matching crumbless toaster.
So, intellectually, we get it; emotionally we just plain want it. Marketing geeks (of which I am one) call it 'aspirational marketing' and, I'm telling you, they go out of their way to make you feel like what you've got right now isn't good enough. There's great stuff in the world and you're not it.
Fortunately my new 'happy place' is the land of the smoodgy, smudgy, smidgy world of beautiful blogs that are real and honest and true. The happy and the WTFHT*? As much as I love a styled 'occasion', I love even more the flaws, the mishaps, the madness and the muddy mess of life. I often wonder why I visit the over-styled blogs when I've got my house porn to keep me feeling sufficiently loserish (there is a book out there called 'The Perfectly Imperfect Home' - I kid you not! Get a life!). I just don't need the blog world to turn on me as well. So, keep letting it all hang out there, bloggers of the world. I embrace you and the wind you threw your caution to.
Do you let it all hang out? Or do you hang back a little?
Is your blog your happy place?
* What The Fuck Happened There?
[Image by schorlemädchen]