A Brief History of My Social Media Use Part 2: The Compare and Despair Era

This was not good for my self-esteem.

I’m doing something new! In light of my social media detox this month (progress not perfection is my motto!), I’m taking it back to the very beginning and reflecting on my history with social media — how and when I started using it, and when it stopped being fun — in this new SERIES (!!) called “A Brief History of My Social Media Use.” My initial installment in this series last week was FREE and not paywalled, so it’s open for everyone to view and you can read it here. If you’d like to read this week’s and subsequent installments, become a paid subscriber here.

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Photo by Mart Production on Pexels

When we last left off, I was unemployed and addicted to scrolling my ex’s Twitter feed, watching through my computer screen as his life went on and he left me behind. Gradually, over the next few years, I left this unhealthy habit behind, and pulled myself away from his tweets to focus on my own life.

Eventually, I got a job — an editorial one — that I had to fight for. At the beginning of 2011 I was temping at Time Inc. when I saw a job posting for an Assistant Editor position at the website AllYou.com. I told HR that I wanted to apply for it and they initially tried to talk me out of it, steering me toward what I’d always done at the company: an administrative assistant position, this time in the Corporate Sales department. Basically, my worst nightmare. I didn’t want to go to work every day feeling like I was wasting my talent — and my life — anymore, and spend my days crying in a bathroom stall because I was so miserable. I’d spent enough time doing that already and I was ready to move on.

I wrote an impassioned cover letter and convinced HR to submit me for the Assistant Web Editor job I wanted — and I got it!!

Finally, as I’d envisioned on my lunch break at Health.com years earlier, social media was actually a part of my job! In my new editorial position, I managed the website’s Facebook profile and Twitter account and contributed to its Pinterest page, too.

What I’d come to realize about my ex Eli*, who was a successful journalist, is that not only did I love him, I envied his career and wanted to be him, in a way. Now that I was finally working in editorial and had left my dreary administrative assistant days behind, I was getting closer to my own goals, instead of misplacing them by projecting them onto him and how he felt (or didn’t feel) about me.

Compare and Despair Enters the Scene

This was all great progress for me, except the dark side of social media was still edging its way in — this time through the phenomenon known as “Compare and Despair.”