I Couldn’t Compete Nor Keep Up With My Online Self

This is the first piece in a series called Off the Record.

For a few years now, I’ve been wrestling with a daunting feeling: I am in direct competition with my online self—and thankfully, it’s not my blogging self I’m fighting.

Due to my corporate marketing background and a stubborn perfectionist trait, my social media profiles have always looked... pristine. Let’s clear something up right out of the gate: I am not a content creator, nor am I an influencer wannabe. But I have always maintained a public online presence.

I’ve always been judged by it, too. My social media was a public platform, and with everything shifting in society lately, I finally hit a breaking point. Nothing serious, since I pulled the plug right when all things ended.

I love photography. I'm genuinely good at still life and self-portraits, if you may. My grid hosts many of my pictures or selfies that carry an organic yet professional feel. Thanks to all my marketing experience, my grid didn't erupt.

Back in the day, it was an extension of a dear diary, a 19-year-old who just started working. My Facebook dates back to 2007, where it's an online memory vault and proof for growth—even if the audience there did grow too, into something unsettling though. My Instagram is a seamless photo gallery of me, my life, and all that I am interested in. (This blog and the poetry blog are two other platforms that are an extension of myself.)

All these platforms serve different content—like a specialised content marketer would do—all serving one person, not even a brand. All of those channels are truthfully me, done so perfectly if I may say so myself (no compset), until I reached a point where... I simply couldn’t compete with my own curated and well-crafted public self-image.

I’m a corporate girl, not an online or a public figure. Many copy my ideas, images, even my personality at some point, but I did not sign up for the competition.

I control the narrative for a living, and the one thing I don’t need to control is myself. In my humble opinion, one shouldn’t be controlled nor competed with, so... I walked away.

I might go back to Meta (Facebook, Instagram), but maybe with the audience changes and be more "controlled" as apps. But for now, I want peace, and anything dictated by my own creation is anything but that.

I’d rather focus on my social life—the life so beautifully captured, but yielding to the interaction and impressions of others. The life I have is the life I have, and I’m planning to keep having it. I will document differently, comfortably, and without the strange behaviour of my friends and stalkers.

They’re not deleted. They are deactivated until further notice, or until there’s a better platform to simply be my own person without the filtering.