All around Facebook and Instagram #topnine pictures are being posted.

All the while, neither Facebook nor Instagram has any idea what events made up my 2018.
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No algorithm can tell about visiting with my Grampa as he looks at me but doesn’t know who I am.
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Sitting in a hospital with my beautiful grandmother hooked up to monitors and machines. She has been taking such good care of my failing Grampa for so many months that her heart is breaking in more ways than one.
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Or being by my Grampa’s bedside as he takes his last breath. Instagram doesn’t know what it feels like to have to call my mom to let her know that her Dad is in Heaven.
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There’s no amount of likes that can explain what it is like to hear only a few weeks later that my other grandfather has cancer. To see he has gotten so thin that he looks like a shell of himself…
Knowing exactly how to take care of him, yet having no idea how to take away the panicked looks on everyone else’s faces. Not knowing how to care for everyone else once he is gone. Needed to be taken care of myself.
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No top nine can explain the knot in my throat as I watch the flag being handed over to my weeping grandmother as she is thanked for my grandfather’s service to our country. 🇺🇲
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Instagram doesn’t know about the ups and downs of loving an elderly dog that has started having seizures, or that she means more to me than most people I know. No matter how much I wish, nothing that I can do will prolong her life.
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Algorithms don’t keep track of what it feels like to see people that you have cared about as long as you can remember fight and tear each other apart. It doesn’t know what it feels like to be disappointed in people that have been looked up to and respected for years as they criticize the people that are closest to you.
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Social media prefers the smiles, the bright colors, the happy faces. Those are going to be the pictures that get the most likes. While Instagram can come up with a #topnine based off of how many times my pictures were liked, the moments that mean the most to me, the ones that made the deepest impressions from 2018, those didn’t ever make it to social media. 
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Here’s my own top nine, the good the bad. The tears, the smiles. The lessons. The losses and the gains. 

Through it all, through it all
My eyes are on You
Through it all, through it all
It is well
Through it all, through it all
My eyes are on You
And it is well with me

~Kristene DiMarco and Bethel Music

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