The Highlight Reel Is a Lie. Here’s What I’m Choosing Instead...

We are all seemingly drawn toward vulnerability, are we not? The social media influencers we follow are often those who seemingly share their true, unfiltered, and entirely raw selves. Yet the struggle is real for me to actually lean in and put my own truth online—regardless of how often I return to this idea. So, what’s my deal?

I have a beautifully rich and challenging life experience, much like all of you, and I feel that my walk through life—the wonderful places it has brought me, both positive and negative—could be of benefit to someone out there. Yet, I still struggle to lean into this immense vulnerability. Is it judgment or is it fear? Is it the worry that someone who knew me from a previous life chapter might read it? Why would that even matter? They weren’t there for the basement moments of my life—so why would I even give them the satisfaction of factoring into a life choice that doesn’t concern them?

Our lives are not a highlight reel.

They are messy, chaotic, and often lack a polished sort of elegance—but for me, that has always been the best stuff. I crave that realness—like peanut butter craves jelly. I want to see the photos you took that didn’t turn out “perfect,” the first draft and stream of consciousness that became your NY Times bestseller, I want to celebrate YOU. Isn’t that celebration even more beautiful when it’s been hard-fought and imperfect? I think there’s another problem with the highlight reel that goes beyond whether we're willing to show the messy parts.

It gives us bad information.

When it comes to social media comparison, we know, intellectually, that what we're seeing is incomplete. We know we're looking at selected moments, good lighting, exciting announcements, vacations, relationships, accomplishments, and carefully chosen pieces of someone else's life... and yet somehow, we still compare our entire lives to it. With ease, we compare someone else's finished product to our first draft. Their career announcement to the part where we're questioning what the hell we're doing. Their beautiful relationship photo to an argument we had Tuesday night. Their vacation to our laundry pile. We're comparing their visible outcome to our invisible process.

And that's not a particularly fair fight.

Social media comparison loves missing information.

The problem isn't simply that other people aren't showing us everything. They don't owe us everything. The problem is what we sometimes do with the information that's missing.

We fill in the blanks. Someone else appears to be thriving, and suddenly their success becomes evidence that we're behind. Their confidence becomes evidence that we should have figured this out by now. Their certainty makes our uncertainty feel like failure.

I'm behind.

Everyone else seems to have this figured out.

Why is this so much harder for me?

Shouldn't I be further along by now?

Meanwhile, we know almost nothing about what it took for that person to arrive at the moment we're looking at. Maybe they struggled enormously. Maybe they're struggling now. Maybe the thing we're admiring isn't even the part of their life they feel good about.

We're working with a tiny amount of information and somehow using it to make enormous judgments about ourselves.

NEWS FLASH: We’re all being judged anyway. Every single day. It’s part of being human. We need not let that be our North Star.

So why let the lazy, moronic, and cowardly life villains stop us from sharing the most meaningful, impactful pieces of our journey? When I hide, I am cutting myself off from deep connections. I also don't think the answer is that we all need to start broadcasting every painful or complicated thing happening in our lives. Vulnerability isn't the same thing as disclosure. Maybe instead, it's simply allowing ourselves—and each other—to be more complicated. You can be successful and struggling. Happy and grieving. Confident and still terrified. Proud of yourself and still have absolutely no idea what comes next.

You can love parts of your life while desperately wanting other parts to change.

Both things can be true at once.

What if we all chose less judgment and more acceptance? Instead of judging others, we made more space—for imperfection, for softness, for flaws? We are all beautifully messy in our own ways. Leaning into that truth—with compassion—creates deeper, more resonant relationships that begin to seep into all the meaningful crevices of our lives. The relationships that move us. The kind that heals. I’m romanticizing, sure—but I would love to live in a world like that. It would be an aggressive (but necessary) pivot from the one we currently find ourselves in.

Life lives in the margins.

In the messiness. In the moments that aren’t Instagram-worthy.

So that is what I am going to do here. I want to share the true and honest version of my life and the lessons I've learned from it because maybe the invitation isn't to share everything.

Maybe it's simply to stop treating the unfinished, complicated, imperfect parts of ourselves as the parts that don't count, and maybe we can get a little more curious about the whole story before deciding what someone else's highlight reel reveals about our own life.

So here’s my challenge to you this week: show a little vulnerability, whatever that looks like for you. Maybe it’s honesty in a relationship. Perhaps it’s putting your creative work into the world, or setting an uncomfortable boundary in a place where you’ve always stayed silent.

It doesn’t matter how big or small. I'll be joining you.

There’s usually more to the story.

A lot of my work comes back to getting curious about the whole story instead of judging ourselves from a single frame. If you’ve been feeling stuck, behind, or like everyone else somehow has life figured out, coaching can be a place to look at what’s actually happening—with a little less judgment and a lot more curiosity.

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