Pain By Numbers

Twitter is hurting me. It can be a sadistic playmate. #FollowFridays, for example, are supposed to mean an influx of many new followers - but for me they can mean the opposite. I suspect people are reminded of me and decide 'Off with her head? Ouch.

For its next trick it has come up with a new form of torture: for the last five or six days I have hovered under a Twitter Follower Milestone. I have just under 3 500 followers.

Those followers have gone up (3 457! Hooray! Nearly there!) and come down (3 452 I'm obnoxious and irritating! The world is unfollowing me!) What those followers haven't done is cracked that magic 3 500 mark. This yo-yoing is not good for my concentration - or my self-esteem.

Usually, of course, I, like most of us, slip-slide along, not paying much attention to the imagined referendum on my obnoxiousness hidden in the number of bots and PR people who have decided to follow me. 2 233 vs 2 463 is no big deal, is it? But in the face of milestones… 1 000? 1 500? Maybe even 150 000 if you're @GarethCliff...?

Suddenly, 3 500 feels important. I find myself checking the number - casually, when I hope no-one is looking - to see whether it has crept up. But the crazy up-and-down continues, and suddenly I'm awash with paranoia and self-doubt. Were my last tweets even more irritating than usual? Am I too boring? Do I tweet too much? The answer to all those questions could be a resounding 'yes'… but being all those things has not stopped me accumulating 3 457 followers.

I am who I am.

And if I am all of those things, I am no more or less those things than l was when I cracked 3 000, for example. And that was a moment when Twitter made me feel Queen of the World.

Milestones are dreadful things. We can all let 31 December, if we choose, become a referendum on our fabulousness. (How come we are not on that yacht moored on Clifton 4th?) A 30th birthday can become a Sword of Damocles hovering overhead. ('Why havent I got the man, the baby, the great job? I'm over the hill.') A 40th birthday can become the end of life, if that life hasn't turned out exactly as you expected it would.

I know the feeling of allowing numbers to rule my life. I've been on many diets, after all. I know those days when the number on the scale somehow held the power to ensure a happy or self-hating start to the morning. But one thing I know now is that no number should have this power. They're just numbers, after all.

Investing meaning in these milestones is taking something from ourselves. I think. It's about hooking our sense of wellbeing to a validation from outside. If you're not on the yacht but with family and friends gathered around a very ordinary braai on New Year's Eve, does that mean your life is a failure? If you do have a terrible New Year's Eve, when you do end up alone or surrounded by strangers, does that make your whole life worthless?

We all have bad days. And some of those days may fall on 31 December. There's always tomorrow... And there's Twitter tomorrow as well.

Author: Vanessa Raphaely