one of the most disheartening things about browsing blogs, pinterest and flickr is all of the perfection and perfect styling. i don't believe that people's lives are actually so perfectly styled all the time. i do my share of cropping photos and advantageously placing things so as not to include clutter, so i'm not completely condemning it - sometimes we have a need to appear perfect, both to ourselves and to the world. but mostly, i think it's exhausting. and at times it fills me with an overwhelming sense of inadequacy, because my house is full of spider webs and bits of straw on the carpet and dust on all of the surfaces.
paper gets stacked and half-finished projects piled up. and when it gets bad enough, i go on a cleaning frenzy and tidy it all up and feel much better for a few minutes. tho' curiously, i often don't really feel that great during the cleaning frenzy, in fact, i often find that i'm fuming about all manner of little irritations while i manically clean.
probably worst of all is the "dining room." it's the main big room of the oldest part of the house (the part that's going to be torn down) and it is still (after a year) a repository of boxes of things that shouldn't be out where it's cold and damp - fabric, seasonal clothes, pretty paper, books, etc.) they actually can't be unpacked because without having the house finished, we don't have enough bookshelves or space. so it has to be the way it is. additionally, it's the only place where the dining table fits, so it also has to be there. during the summer, we eat out in our terrace and this room is only used for my sewing projects, but now that it's cold, we eat here too.
i think to an extent you become immune to it and you don't see the boxes anymore and just go about living your life, knowing that it's a sort of long-term temporary thing that you have to live with. but there are times when i look at the perfect scenes in the blogosphere and feel rather frustrated by it all. however, this is a process that we're in and it's going to take time. deep breath.
as much as i love to cook, i'm not that big on cleaning it all up afterwards. maybe because the room itself isn't that inviting with those pink cupboards and the stained, cheap linoleum floor (why bother to try to keep it
but now you know what it's really like at my house.
anyway, this is the kind of truth-telling i was thinking of (not name-calling or other such nasty things - i get that out of my system on a private blog). i just don't believe that lives are styled and curated in reality the way they are in today's blogosophere.
so now, it's your turn for some truth, are you relieved or horrified?