🙇🏻‍♀️

This morning, I am seeing the stories of my life, through the lens of social media, and the financial aspect of needing to work and have a job.

I’ve been feeling like I don’t know how to post on social media.

I don’t know what I want to do on social media, or how I want to post on it.

I think I need to take a moment, or many moments, to appreciate all the changes since I ~ f i r s t ~ started to use “social media”, even if at the start it was not even called that. And what I liked about it.

It was aim chats and online journals (xanga for the West Coast, livejournal for the East Coast). This turned into the very exciting and fun Myspace… which turned into the early facebook… which then branched off into blogging for some, which was then mostly replaced by Instagram, which led to Influencer culture on that platform and also on Youtube. And now, besides the options of Twittter, Threads, Tik Tok (hey, all starting with the letter ‘t’), Tumblr, oh - can’t forget Twitch and Reddit. But also … present day: decentralizd social media.

That’s a lot of changes.

There are also the personal changes of each individual. In their external life, and internal changes relating to brain development. Starting to use “social media" as a teenager (from middle school! High school… College… )

I thought the “adulting” transition from college to after college was rough and stressful. Highschool and college felt like a lot of experimentation and self-discovery, or self-creation and expression, especially with the various new online spaces (and with its downsides too). Then, after college (with a BA in Psychology) … not knowing what to do. Finding that jobs often feel busy and impersonal. Wondering if it’s just me, like is this just my bad luck or lack of the right skills? And it felt meaningless.

I’ve been rediscovering Frozen 2. That is a movie that provides a lot of good guidance to life. Cue song: “Some things never change” (duet between Anna and Olaf - oh actually, Kristoff, and Elsa each sing their own stanza of the song too).

With all the personal changes of growing from a teenager to an adult, with technology that *originally* started with Atari computers and very basic internet to … everything that it is, I need to hum that song and think about all the important things that don’t really change. The gist of the song - you will always have people you care about (and people who care about you). That is the ‘you’ that each character holds on to.