I post. I tweet. I pin. I like, favorite, share, retweet and text. I have complete conversations using nothing but emojis and can hashtag for maximum impact. I know how to pronounce “meme” and can appreciate a well-timed gif. I regularly use my phone to shop and settle factual disagreements.

My life is captured in perfectly curated Instagram moments.

And I am a total fake.

I remember a time before the internet. I hand wrote term papers. I mourned mixtapes when CDs were introduced. I memorized friends’ phone numbers and used my parents’ home phone to call them. Those friends? People I knew in real life. I didn’t have Facebook or a cellphone until my early twenties.

I am not a Millennial. None of today’s social media or online networking has come naturally to me. I had to teach myself, I had to work at it and it is often still work.

When I send a tweet, I have to stand in a corner rewording my thought into less than 140 characters. A selfie requires at least 25 snaps to capture the best angle, a run through the FaceTune app to banish blemishes and the perfect Instagram filter to make the whole thing look “natural.” There is nothing “instant” about it.

It’s exhausting. But it’s also absolutely necessary.

Forget that it’s technically part of my job, both as VM’s social media director and as editor of The Millennial Project. It is also the language of the largest population of Americans to ever exist, the largest group of consumers in history, and if you aren’t fluent, you aren’t relevant. Relevancy is a business’s lifeblood.

The good news is that it does get easier with repetition. My advice if you’re feeling overwhelmed tackling social media for your business? Try your hand at it in your personal life and then fake it till you make it. It worked for me.

dcarroll@jobson.com