Hashtag Blessed

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#Blessed - Comparison Vs. Celebration - City Moms Blog Network

Does #blessed bug you? Maybe it shouldn’t.

Who hasn’t seen #blessed used (and overused) in social media?

Hashtag Blessed and her sidekick Hashtag So Blessed have invaded Facebook and Instagram. You can’t get away from them, like mosquitos in the summer or ants at a picnic. Those two are everywhere you look. EV-REE-WHERE.

Someone’s artfully staged baby pictures, where the infant is peacefully slumbering while adorably cocooned in the back of a Tonka dump truck? #blessed

A snap of a beautiful bouquet of flowers on an uncluttered kitchen counter with a “that’s right, my boo is a keeper” caption? #blessed

Gender reveals? Cutesy poo pregnancy announcement photos showing a lineup of everyone’s feet with an empty pair of baby booties? Potty training whoo hoo’s? Finding a really cute pair of shoes on sale and exactly in your size for 75% off? #soblessed

I’m aware that there are a bunch of #blessed naysayers out there. Maybe you’re one of them. Maybe a #blessed sighting makes you twitchy, or even worse. Maybe #blessed is grounds for unfriending, unfollowing, muting or whatever it’s called nowadays.

Tongue in Cheek

I haven’t jumped on the #blessed bandwagon myself, unless it’s used tongue in cheek style, with sarcasm. For instance:

But that’s just me. I have plenty of friends who post snaps of clean babies, cute puppies, syrupy pregnancy announcements, bump photos, and clean houses. I see status updates about ahhhmazing husbands who buy flowers, get up in the middle of the night with babies, give killer backrubs and probably never fart.

Sometimes I see these pictures and smile. Sometimes I click the like button or the little heart button. Sometimes I make some inane comment like “awwww” or “so sweet” with a ton of exclamation marks just to drive my point home. Hey, I try to be a supportive friend and stuff.

And let’s be honest: Sometimes, I see the #soblessed and I roll my eyes. Sometimes, my eyes roll so flipping far back into my head that I come thisclose to being able to see my butt from the other side. What can I say? I’m human. Also, there are muscles around your eyes, so eye rolling is kind of like exercise.

…maybe it’s not up to us to make the call on what #blessed means to someone else or to overanalyze whether or not they’re #trulyblessed in our eyes.

Blessed Has Many Definitions

I roll my eyes because that carefully staged “clean kitchen” photo on Instagram probably has a basket of dirty laundry just out of the camera’s range. When you see the picture of the cute, clean baby on Facebook, maybe there’s a dirty diaper on the coffee table that didn’t make it in to the shot. Because of course not. Maybe the cute baby treated the photographer to some not-so-cute projectile spit up thirty seconds after the picture was taken. Maybe the awesome, flower-buying, backrub-giving, non-farting husband leaves his underwear on the floor right next to the hamper or forgets to take out the trash.

Who really knows? And who really cares?

Aren’t there bigger things to get our bloomers in a twist about than someone posting a happy picture and telling the internets they feel blessed? How about the exceptionally divisive presidential election? The fact that innocent people have been gunned down in the street? Police brutality? Police officers being shot while trying to protect us? Poverty? Hunger? Terrorism? I could go on, but I don’t really need to. Spend thirty seconds scrolling through Facebook and I bet you’ll see something that should disturb you more than someone’s (perhaps) slightly embellished “my life is so super-peachy.”

Think about it.

Does someone counting their blessings in the online space really mean that your life is less blessed? If someone expresses their happiness or satisfaction with their own circumstances why do we automatically jump to the conclusion that that we are somehow less favored?

If I claim to be #blessed because my kids put their plates in the dishwasher without being asked, am I really suggesting anyone else’s life is somehow less charmed? Maybe I’m just freaking ecstatic that my kids did something without me having to remind them thirty zillion times and I want to share it with…well, with the entire universe.

Also? If my kids put their plates in the dishwasher without me nagging them, I’d seriously suspect they were aliens, or something.

But seriously.

Whether someone views being blessed as grace from a higher power or just good fortune, why are we so quick to tear them down? Why do we automatically leap to accuse them of bragging, embellishing even being disingenuous, even if only in our own minds? I’m as guilty of it as anyone.

If you enter #blessed into Google, you’ll come up with dozens of hits on why #blessed is annoying. I asked several of my friends how they felt about it and the response was overwhelmingly negative.

But, maybe #blessed really just means that someone is feeling especially appreciative of the good things in their life. Maybe this is something we don’t have to dissect. Maybe we shouldn’t be so quick to slap the bragalicious label on someone’s chest. Maybe we don’t need to feed our inner negative beast by listing all of the things that are probably going wrong in that person’s life.

Her husband sent her flowers? Pfft. He’s probably cheating.

Her kid’s finally potty trained? Well it’s about time. He’s almost four.

If #blessed is the most egregious thing you can find on social media, count yourself lucky. Why not give someone the benefit of the doubt and be happy for the blessings in their life? Maybe they’re really happy and happy is good, right? Why not hit that like button, smile and move on? If you can’t do that, allow yourself that little moment of quiet eye rolling and move on to something that’s really worthy of your disdain.

All eye-rolling over suspected photo staging and possible humblebrags aside, maybe it’s not up to us to make the call on what #blessed means to someone else or to overanalyze whether or not they’re #trulyblessed in our eyes.

Think about it.

#Blessed doesn’t bug me. It shouldn’t bug you, either.

Today we challenge you to choose CELEBRATION over COMPARISON in the face of #blessed!

Contributing Sister Site and Author

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About {Jill}

Jill Robbins is a wannabe wine snob and lazy runner. She moved to San Antonio when she was 18 months old, so she considers herself a native. She has a degree in social psychology, which so far has been unhelpful in understanding the behavior of her husband and three children. She’s lived all over the world: the Midwest, England, and Germany, and she’s excited to be back in her hometown but still trying to get used to the heat and humidity again. She writes about adoption, motherhood, and midlife on her blog, Ripped Jeans and Bifocals, and freelances for various magazines and websites such as The Huffington Post, She Knows,Babble, and Scary Mommy. She was part of the 2015 cast of Listen to Your Mother, Austin and really likes coffee. A lot. You can follow Jill on Facebook and Twitter.