TheStyleGeek.com

Yesterday I attempted to make the salted caramel macarons I saw on my favorite blog, Cupcakes and Cashmere.  To look at Emily’s pictures, you’d think these cookies were a fluffy piece of easy-bake heaven.  To make them yourself, you will realize they are messy, not-so-fluffy and just downright frustrating.

Like her post about the macarons, all of Emily’s other posts indicate that her life is pretty close to perfect (or at least it looks that way in pictures).  As if Hollywood wasn’t bad enough, social media and the blogosphere has given us girls a whole slew of women to compare ourselves–and feel inferior–to.  While I don’t doubt that many of the ladies who put their lives online each day do lead a fabulous existence, the truth is that all of our lives (celebrities, bloggers and social media mavens included) often look a little more like MY macarons: sticky, difficult and kind of a disaster.

Unfortunately, many of us fail to remind ourselves of that aforementioned truth as we look at the fabulous outfits, careers, families, houses, etc that so many of our favorite personalities–or even some of our closest friends–put on display online.  I mean, seriously, how often have you navigated away from a blog or even just logged off of Facebook feeling discontent because at least 10 other people are leading a life that is far more fabulous than yours? It’s a vicious cycle, and it has to stop.

So, in an attempt to expose just how much your favorite bloggers and Facebook friends aren’t telling you about their life, I’ll be launching a new series called The Style Geek In Real Life (otherwise known as TSGIRL).  Starting next week, I’ll be sharing some of the more glamorous moments of my daily life with all of you on this blog and then linking to the TSGIRL version of that moment on my other blog, JennPrentice.com.  (Yes, that means I’ll finally get to start blogging over there too.) This series will be part of a larger movement I’ll be starting to encourage all of you to “Live Counterculturally” in 2012.  (More details about that to follow on Monday as well.)

If nothing else, I hope that my TSGIRL posts serve as a reminder to all of you that no matter what it might look like from the outside, no one’s life is perfect.  But like my salted caramel macarons, sometimes the sweetest moments in life lie in our greatest failures.