My love hate relationship with social media

And the stupidity of the phrase "I'm an imperfect ally."

When I was a young executive at Levi’s — somewhere around 2009 when I was the senior vice president of Dockers, I was active on Facebook. I had signed up the year prior to promote the release of my own book.

And it all was kind of fun. It was the early days of social media and the venom hadn’t made itself quite known (though I did get a good dragging when the book came out I’ll say that). It was still the era of finding old high school boyfriends and reconnecting with your best friend from 1st grade and doing all those silly quizzes.

I distinctly remember, at one point, posting a status update (isn’t that what they were called on Facebook? Are they still? I rarely visit that site anymore) that I had the Sunday night blues. This affliction was persistent into my early 40s and I always interpreted it as a hangover from my gymnastics days. Sundays were our only day off and facing another 7 hour workout on Monday with a probable weight gain (maybe a 1/2 pound, maybe a pound) from having a day with no intense workout, prompted anxiety, fear, depression, and just a general very intense gloominess.

We were going to be berated for the half pound gain. We were going to be forced to do extra conditioning to lose the half pound in sauna suits made to induce maximum sweat. We were going to be shamed. Monday was going to suck.

As I got older, grew up, this feeling of anxiety on Sundays persisted. Even though I didn’t hate Mondays. Even though I didn’t hate work. It was a habit I couldn’t break.

Anyway, I posted that I had the Sunday night blues on Facebook. I probably wanted more time with my kids. Maybe I’d had a fight with my husband (we would separate about a year later). Maybe I had to fire someone the next day. Who knows. But I felt malaise.

The next day my HR person for the brand told me that I really shouldn’t do that. I was a leader. It made it seem like I hated work. It was un-leader-like.

I brushed her off. It just seemed so antiquated. The idea that a leader wasn’t a person with feelings. But we were in a crossover period. We weren’t yet preaching to “bring your authentic self to work.”

We were about to transition from employees having no idea what leaders thought, and what their lives were like to the world where everyone knows everything about everyone. But I can guarantee you not a single person on my team thought to themselves upon reading my Facebook post: boy, Jen hates work. What a terrible leader!

As a side note, one of my strengths as a leader during my time at Levi’s was always that I was “authentic.” Really, I was just normal. I didn’t pretend to be someone I wasn’t. If I was tired because I was up all night with my baby, I said so. So it was just kind of dumb “old rules” to say you can’t share that on social media.

Cut to: the year 2020 when I decided to object to covid school closures and other restrictions, a very unpopular position in San Francisco, as you might imagine. That objecting happened mostly on X. This was not sharing anything about my life (like the Sunday blues post) but it was expressing a viewpoint that was heretical.

Cut to: 2022 the year I resigned from my job and the company I had worked in for 23 years. My resignation was inextricably linked to my X presence during covid.

I have a love hate relationship with social media as most people probably do. Mine just might be a tad more extreme.