Mom Gets Real About What Goes Into The 'Perfect Selfie'

She will also make you want to give your “mum tum” a big hug

Raise your hand if you’ve ever been personally victimized by social media. Yep, that’s what we thought. We can just feel the thousands of hands flying in the air. You know why? Because most of the time, our social media selves are our best, most picture-perfect selves. In other words, our social media selves are usually complete bullshit.

No one knows this better than Tova Leigh, a UK-based actress, writer, and popular mom blogger. She took to her Facebook page to perfectly explain why we should embrace our authenticity without shaming herself and others about taking pretty selfies.

She talks about a picture she recently posted of herself on her Instagram account that received plenty of internet validation and compliments. Then she decided to hell with it, while being told she’s “sexy” is awesome, so is being honest about what it means to be sexy.

“Today I am sharing the ‘behind the scenes’ of that image,” she wrote. “How I actually looked when it was taken, without 20 attempts to get it right, without cropping out the bits I don’t like and without adding the ‘make me look pretty’ filter.”

Look, no one is here to come down on the “pretty” filters and the cropping and the FaceTune-ing or whatever else we all use to make ourselves look “better” on social media. If that’s your thing, cool. We all do it sometimes. But it totally sucks that we even feel the need to do it in the first place. When we “correct” photos of ourselves, it just means we’re contributing to the increasing amount of depression and insecurity attributed to the way we compare our lives on social media.

Leigh shared the behind-the-selfie image of herself in all its “mum-tum, cellulite, granny pants and absolutely zero thigh gap glory!”

PREACH. She’s a mother of three, so she knows that our bodies have created, birthed, nurtured, and endlessly hovered over children. She knows firsthand what we go through, and isn’t afraid to get brutally honest about everything from pregnancy nipples to belly flab. Can’t we give ourselves a break? Body standards are garbage and picture-perfect families don’t exist outside of the pictures.

After reading an article that discussed the rise of depression and insecurity in young people due to social media image projections, Leigh felt a “massive amount of guilt” after just sharing what she called “one of those perfect-looking images” just a few days earlier. So she decided venture far out of her comfort zone and share the behind-the-scenes image of her standing in front of the computer in her underwear “for the whole world to see.”

“I am actually quite a shy person and I myself and not always confident with how I look,” she told us. “But the point I was trying to make is that what you see on social media is not always reality. Humans tend to share the good stuff and I guess that’s very natural, but I think the young people who look at social media need to know that life and what is real is much more beautiful than any airbrushed image with filters applied then they see on social media.”

Next time your start comparing yourself to other people’s lives on Facebook or Instagram, Leigh has three perfect pieces of advice to remember:

“Social media is full of shit.

You are beautiful just the way you are. And there is nothing sexier than being real.”

Don’t you just wanna take this post, buy it a nice dinner, and marry it? It’s such a heartfelt message and a solid reality check for all of us.