Social / Personal / Professional / LinkedIn

I really struggle with what to post here on LinkedIn.

That might sound like career suicide for a social media expert to admit, but I’m being completely honest here.

Figuring out what to post on social media on which platforms and when is hard. That’s why there’s an entire industry dedicated to social media management. It’s why people like me exist. I’m really proud to call myself a social media expert and am not going to let my imposter syndrome talk me out of claiming that title.

But the kind of brand social media that I do for a living is not the same kind of social media I do as part of living.

They are two different worlds.

I’m also not going to bullshit you and tell you that I love all social media all the time and that I know exactly what I’m doing on all of my personal accounts at all times.

I can tell a brand all day every day how to run its social. I can run a brand’s social better than the brands most days, which is literally the only reason I have a job which for me means health insurance!

In some cases, I have clients whose personal socials I run as the individual account, and that I know exactly how to do. I can write my boss a better social caption than she can write herself for Women’s History Day, but idk how to tribute myself starting every March.

But how creepy would it have been if today I’d been like “Congratulations, to the amazing women out there, including me!”

Give me a brand that needs help developing a voice on Twitter all day every day over crafting one of my own pieces of social content.

There’s a difference.

Especially in this weird social media world we now live in.

The brand/vs personal social account distinction is also an important distinction to think about when we’re talking about social media and working from home, where the lines can get SO blurry.

For example, even though I’m a social media expert and that is my job, I’m very intentional of not using work time to post selfies. Seriously. Yes, like all of us, I’m guilty of taking a selfie at work occasionally. But despite what my title might make you think I do for a living, it is not my job to post seflies of myself! And this applies to work from home I’m dead serious. If I’m going to post a picture of myself with a dog, I’m not doing that on work’s time. Yes, my job is to be on social media, but as the brand, engaging with people as the brand. No one is paying I, Amanda Ota, to post a selfie to my personal Facebook/LinkedIn/Instagram/LinkedIn and TikTok (omg I wish.) Even if I take it onthe picturesque campus of my day job, I'm not posting it until after 5 p.m. I can get stuck writing a caption for forty minutes, they're not paying for that!

I waited very intentionally to write this post until I finished my work day. Because this is me using my personal time to share my personal and professional opinions on my account. I wouldn’t dream of charging one of my freelance clients to cover the hours I spend enjoying social media on my own free will.

Why would I waste hours of my work’s resources doing the same?

This platform has become this beautiful place where we’re sharing more of our lives on a professional network more than we ever used to bring into the office. And something last night lead me to think about how we’re ensuring that our full, true, authentic self is showing up to work every day. On the couch or in the office. Sitting at home with our dogs or standing at our desk alone or on a Zoom with someone who for the love of God still does not understand muting.

How are we showing up?

I just started watching Inventing Anna and I’m already driving my boyfriend crazy yelling about all the things about all the journalism. (SUCH ACCURATE DEPICTIONS OF JOURNALISM OMG that moment when she’s in the pitch meeting with the three male editors and they just aren’t listening to her I felt that in the deep bowels of my soul.)

Putting my fangirling of that aside, I bring this up to make a point I swear… in the episode, there’s a moment where the reporter has a bunch of social media posts from Anna Delvey taped up like a police murder solving board (please someone seriously what are those called?) and she’s looking at the totality of Anna’s social presence and she’s freaked out about all the conflicting identities that appear to be emerging.

Can you imagine the horror of having to look at your social media life in that way? How many emerging personalities would you find?

I’ll go first.

I don’t mention my sobriety on my LinkedIn.

My sobriety is my identity and yet here on this platform dedicated to building my professional identity… I leave it off.

In my opinion, this is a MAJOR oversight. But where on LinkedIn do I sneak sober into my title? I don’t like even just that word choice of “sneak.” It suggests that my sobriety is something I need to slip into the details of my identity, opposed to celebrating it for the miracle it is.

It’s the external representation of something I’ve struggled with within my identity for years.

My sobriety, while critical to every part of my life, is not something I go singing in dancing on about in job interviews. And as far as I’ve experienced, there isn’t a real clear place to identify oneself as sober on a job application. If there was a spot for it, I wouldn’t trust the stigma held against alcoholics to keep me from checking that box, saving my sobriety just for me and leaving it out of my professional life entirely.

Here's the thing though: my sobriety is integral to my being. Without it, I’m barely even a human let alone a professional. Take it from a woman whose drinking cost her two jobs, it’s a well-demonstrated fact. Anything I put before my sobriety I lose. Even critical parts of my identity like my job or my significant other. Trust me, I’ve done the research.

I worry though, in celebrating my sobriety, am I risking my professionalism? Who wants to hire someone who has a sterling job history, but only since they’ve gotten sober? Is that a risk employers are willing to take on? But what if we relapse? Even these questions are ones that demonstrate the stigma we have about those in recovery.

So then when in the interview process is the right time for me to bring up my sobriety? When exactly does one add their sober date to their LinkedIn? Is it after a year a sober? Or two? Or how about after your first sober work anniversary? And then how do you explain the eight month gap in your resume when you went to rehab? These are all questions I’ve grappled with as I’ve navigated my career as a sober woman.

These are the questions that have been on my mind since I attended a professional development workshop we recently held on campus for our student workers regarding identity in the workplace.

I give my amazing colleague Vippy a ton of credit for the work she does in her role because when Vippy is moderating, you know better than to just roll up and think you can pool spray an event. If you’re entering that room, you’re going to be an active participant in that activity. So, while I was there covering the event for student workers, really I was also attending an incredible workshop on identity.

And thank god because if you’d tried to tell me previously that as a 31-year-old woman who has been working in the professional world for over a decade that I needed to consider my professional identity I would have laughed in your fucking face. I know who I am. Or do I?

What Vippy did in that workshop was a gentle introduction to exploring your identity and the different roles you adopt when you’re embracing or shying away from different aspects of your identity. What she created in that room for me that day was the opportunity to, for the first time, consider how the identities I carry professionally and personally differ.

Mind blown.

My sobriety, that paramount principle of my humanity, is not a part of my identity that I have been allowing myself to own while at work or here on LinkedIn. Blame stigma, the time it took me to get sober, any myriad of reasons for this: at the end of the day, the only person creating this boundary between who I am as a sober woman and who I am as a successful professional is me. And that right there is some bullshit. So this is me, identifying myself as sober and a professional and declaring that for me, these things are intertwined.

This doesn’t mean I’m going to start filling your feed with AA sayings or that anything is going to change. Because if you didn’t know I was sober before and now you do, it shouldn’t change anything. If this discovery does change something for you, I’m here to have a conversation about it. I also understand if you don’t’ want to be connected via LinkedIn to me anymore either, that’s your personal decision.

I’m just doing what I need to do so that I don’t end up like Anna Delvy with a police crime-solving board about me that doesn’t paint a clear picture of who exactly I am.