"you have an amazing lifestyle..."

“... one I can only aspire to one day.”

That's what a friend said to me recently. And, to be honest, it left me a bit dumbfounded.

You see, I currently live in a country that is steeped in natural beauty and, because I simply love to hike, I try to head out for a walk nearly every weekend. Sometimes I'll venture up a mountain with my husband but, oftentimes, I'll go for a forest walk on my own. Walking helps me recharge, it helps me get back in tune with nature, it helps me rebalance. And because where I live isn't my birth country, I share my photos on Facebook for friends, however mostly for family back home as they enjoy staying up to date with my mini adventures. And that's why my friend said to me, “You have an amazing lifestyle, one I can only aspire to one day”. She saw my photos and craved some of what she could see in her own life.

Yet, that's just a little bit of my story. It shows a very small part of my life, albeit a completely real and genuinely lovely part of it. Those mountains and forest walks aren't a carefully constructed version of my life abroad. I really do live somewhere beautiful. I really do hike and explore, and I really do appreciate those experiences. They're simply not the whole story.

When you live in a different country from family and old friends, photographs and occasional updates can easily become much of the version of your life they see. They see the beautiful scenery, the weekend adventures and the interesting places you've visited because, naturally, those are the moments you're more likely to photograph and share. They don't necessarily see all the ordinary days around them or know everything else that has been part of your life.

And in my case, there's another reason those photographs mean so much to me. I've spent more years than I care to remember not being able to get out and enjoy nature and hiking because my Crohn's Disease/Colitis was so active. For many a weekend I'd be lying on the sofa, often in pain, unable to enjoy something as ordinary as going for a walk. Now that I can get out and about and enjoy life again, I'm not gonna let it pass me by. I appreciate the simple act of walking and the simple act of getting out in the car to visit another city or town in a way I might never have appreciated them otherwise. I know what it's like to be too ill to do those things and, while I'm able, I plan to grab life by the proverbials.

So when my friend looks at one of my photographs and sees an amazing lifestyle, I see something else within that photograph too. I see the fact that I'm able to be there. I know the history that sits behind that walk and why being able to put on my shoes and head out to explore means so much to me. My friend can't see that history in a photograph. She doesn't see the days and weekends I spent on the couch or the regular visits to hospital to get pumped with drugs in an attempt to keep my body healthy. Those experiences are part of my life too, just as real as the mountain views and forest walks, even though they aren't the parts somebody scrolling through my Facebook photographs would necessarily know about.

And that's what her comment really made me think about. We can never know everything about somebody else's life, so how can we know from the part we can see that their life is amazing or perfect or something we'd want in its entirety? I've shared one example of the many bumps on my life's journey, however there are many more, just as everybody has parts of their life that aren't visible from the outside. What we see on Facebook and social media, or what we hear when we meet up with friends, is often the good stuff, the experiences that bring a smile to our face, the fun times and the things we naturally want to share. That doesn't make those moments false.

My photographs aren't pretending I went hiking when I was really sitting on the sofa. They're photographs of real experiences that brought me genuine pleasure. However, we're still only seeing part of somebody's life. I find that particularly interesting when I think about living abroad because a photograph taken somewhere beautiful can so easily become symbolic of the entire lifestyle. From a distance, somebody sees the mountains, the countryside or another mini adventure and imagines what it must be like to live there. Meanwhile, the person who actually lives there knows that this beautiful experience sits within a much larger life that can't possibly be captured in a selection of photographs.

Both things can be true. I can have an amazing walk through beautiful countryside and have other parts of my life that are challenging. I can feel enormously fortunate to live somewhere beautiful without believing that every aspect of my life is therefore perfect. Somebody else can look at my photographs and genuinely admire what they see without actually knowing what it feels like to live the entirety of my life. That's why comparing the whole of our own life with the visible part of somebody else's rarely gives us a fair picture of either. We know everything that sits beneath the surface of our own lives. We know the worries, disappointments and difficult periods as well as the good bits. Yet when we look across at somebody else, we're often comparing all of that with whatever small portion of their life happens to be visible to us. It's a little like standing at the fence and believing the grass must be greener on the other side without knowing very much about what's happening beyond the fence.

I've always liked the idea of watering your own patch of grass instead. Not because everybody can simply recreate somebody else's lifestyle. We don't all have the same circumstances, resources, health, responsibilities or opportunities, and what is readily available to one person may not be available to another. However, we can look at what we're admiring and ask what it is we're actually drawn towards. For my friend, was it really my life she wanted, or was there something within those photographs that represented something she wanted more of in her own? Was it nature? Exploration? More time outside? The freedom to experience somewhere different? Because once we stop trying to mentally move into somebody else's life, we can turn our attention back towards our own and notice what might genuinely be possible within the circumstances we have. That's what watering our own grass means to me.

It's very easy to spend so much time looking across the fence that we overlook what's already growing on our side of it. We can become so busy wishing for somebody else's perceived lifestyle that we're only half-present within the life that's actually ours. And I don't want to do that. My own experiences with illness have changed the way I appreciate some very ordinary freedoms. Being able to walk matters to me because I remember when walking wasn't something I could take for granted. Being able to get out and explore matters because I know what it was like when my health prevented me from doing it. Those difficult periods are part of the same life as the photographs my friend admired. They have shaped the way I experience those good moments now and the gratitude I feel when I'm standing somewhere beautiful and know that I was able to get there.

So yes, I do have parts of my lifestyle that are amazing. I'm grateful for them. I enjoy them. And I'm going to keep taking photographs of them and sharing those mini adventures with the people back home who enjoy seeing where I've been. However, they're part of my life, not the whole of it. I suspect that's worth remembering whenever we find ourselves looking at somebody else's life and imagining that what we can see must represent everything they experience. We cannot live somebody else's life, just as they cannot live ours. We can admire what they have, be inspired by something we see and even allow it to show us something we'd like more of for ourselves, without deciding that their grass must therefore be greener.

I'd rather keep watering my own. Keep appreciating what's growing there, keep noticing what matters to me and keep living the life that's actually mine, with its beautiful parts, its challenging parts and all the ordinary bits that will probably never make it onto Facebook. Because sometimes the life somebody else thinks looks amazing from a distance means something entirely different when you're the one who knows the whole story.