Moments before joining friends at a microbrewery to celebrate a coworker’s promotion, 28-year-old Chelsea Daniels snapped a picture of her boots surrounded by beautiful fall leaves. Noticing how much it ruled, she cropped it to make it symmetrical, added a filter to make the colors pop, and added a clutch caption: “These boots were made for strollin’… #ilovefall”. Like any reasonable person, Daniels could see that this post would certainly gain enough likes and comments that you’d have to expand to see all of them. She got on the subway, excited for what lay ahead.
When she exited the subway 45 minutes later, the picture had accrued only eight likes. Daniels was floored.
“I’m just trying to have a good time,” said Daniels. “You think to yourself, it’s a pretty picture. It’s seasonal. It’s shoes. What is not to like?” she continues, frowning behind a flight of beers. “It’s just hard to put on a happy face around others when you’re dealing with private pain.”
“She just wasn’t herself that night,” says Daniels’s best friend, Ana, noticed something was off right away. “We feel horrible for her, but with this kind of thing, there’s not a whole lot anyone can say to make it better.”
Many of Chelsea’s coworkers were complimenting her on the big account she just closed, but according to Ana, “Chelsea just stared into the bowl of artichoke dip and smiled halfheartedly.”
Despite the company of good friends and great conversation, Daniels couldn’t shake the sting of failure. “I have a lot to be grateful for, and I know that,” says Daniels, on the brink of tears. “I just can’t help but wonder what I did to deserve this. Is it because I posted it too late? Is it my handle? Were the ellipses too much? I may never know.”
Daniel’s coworker, Lauren, was also sympathetic. “I once posted a picture of myself with a new haircut and it got 13 likes. I barely survived that.”
Daniels is taking the hit particularly hard after coming off lots of social media success, such as the birth of her nephew and meeting a local celebrity at a 5K event. “You get used to a certain standard of fame, and when you can’t achieve that again, you think, Is this the end of me?”
She wrestled with just deleting the post altogether, but admitted, “It is probably too late.”
At press time, Daniels was seen standing in a pile of leaves, taking picture after picture of her boots.
