Over the past week my Instagram feed has been flooded with people's "Best of Nine" photos from the past year. The collage of their most liked photos were followed by a lengthy paragraph about how great and "blessed" their lives were this year.

As a milennial who works in social media, I wanted to see which photos were my most liked so I went to the 2016 Best Nine website for the generator to tell me how blessed my year was.

Looking at my top nine, it's easy to draw conclusions that I had a fabulous year filled with a busy social life that included meeting Andy Cohen. Well that is all true and I'm not discrediting the wonderful experiences I did have, but what's not reflected in the photos, besides voting for Hillary Clinton, is how difficult 2016 was for me.

On January 13th last year, my family made the decision to put our cat Corky down after 18 years. Corky was my buddy since I was five-years-old and not having him wait on the steps for me when I came home from sleepaway camp, college or running errands was difficult. Then four days later my friend Carli from camp was killed by a drunk driver. You always hear in the news tragedies like that happening to other people and then when it's someone you know, it's a gut wrenching feeling. It took me three days to finally cry about it because I didn't accept that she was gone. There's not a day goes by where I don't think about Carli and how her potential was cruelly cut short. I try everyday to embody her fearless and empathetic spirit.

This post isn't intended for you all to pity me but rather draw your attention to how social media is misrepresenting ourselves and our peers.

Social media creates the illusion that everything in our lives is grand; we display our ideal selves. On Facebook people share more posts about positives than the negatives in their personal life. On Instagram we only pick photos, filters, write witty caption and make edits that we know will generate a lot of likes. I love Instagram don't get me wrong and I'm guilty of doing all the above, but we shouldn't make assumptions about people's lives through their social media accounts. This year's Best of Nine emphasized to me more than ever how sometimes the grass isn't always greener on the other side.

For 2017, let's all resolve not to make snap judgements on other's people's characters or lives based on social media.