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Raise your hand if you've ever spent an evening trolling design and lifestyle and everything-pretty blogs, then looked up at your own imperfect life -- that messy living room, that unawesome wardrobe, that unletterpressed stationery -- and experienced a life-sigh. So-and-so-blogger would never eat her kids' leftover frozen pizza for dinner, your Internet-weary heart tells you, she's probably having a photogenic stir-fry made from voluptuous locally-sourced greens. Well guess what? Apparently, even the people with the prettiest blogs you know aren't perfect. And they have begun a kind of movement, revealing their imperfections in, it must be admitted, very pretty, lovely, perfect blog posts.

The "Things I'm Afraid to Tell You" meme started with a post on Make Under My Life. Jess Constable writes, "Though I like to think I’m pretty much an open book online, there are things about me that I hide for fear of rejection or judgment. But my emotional, fearful mind freaks when I think about sharing some things in my life." And thus, she launches into a list of the things she's afraid to reveal.  Number one: "Yesterday after a tense customer service call, I cried in front of my assistant and new intern. (Not the “ugly cry,” but pretty close.)"

Within a few days, her friend Ez posted her own "Things I'm Afraid to Tell You" to the Creature Comforts blog, about how the idea had gone viral, and shared, despite her professed nerves, her own list. She admits that, despite writing a blog devoted to perfect and pretty things, "The nitty-gritty is that some months have been so tight that I've worried about making my rent payment or even buying groceries...a handful of times it's gotten scary enough that I've had panic attacks daily just trying to think of how I'll make it through."

Since these first posts, the movement has spread to hundreds of blogs. It's really worth the time to peruse some of these posts, if for no other reason than to see how mundane some of these confessions are. We are all so afraid of revealing any imperfections at all, as if the ability to curate the image of a perfect life has created its very own brand of insecurity, a whole new cyber-neurosis. Why should we be afraid to reveal that we are uncrafty? That we care what people think of us? That we love sitcoms?

As Ez puts it, "we are all just a little bit sick of all this perfection." And many of these bloggers add in their TIATTY posts that this dose of honesty has changed the way they want to write -- real names appear for the first time, and pledges to share "real selves" in addition to images of aspirational lives. So if you're beating yourself up over a speck of imperfection, it may help to write your own "Things I'm Afraid to Tell You." Even if (especially if) your "You" is yourself.

Read More:
Why You Need to Embrace Imperfection
Face Your Inner Perfectionist