It's a self portrait that I curated based on a picture of my ex with his new girlfriend. The dress is what she was wearing and my stance is similar to hers in the picture. The text that goes alongside it is something I wrote as a reaction to first seeing the photograph online. It came from a very honest place, how I felt at the time, but it is not meant to be anything personally directed at her. It is a statement about the role social media plays in our lives and relationships and the voyeuristic nature of it, that I believe people are able to relate to.I think it's a natural reaction and I think it's important to be able to acknowledge that. The book hopefully normalises these feelings that we are often too embarrassed to tell anyone about. I've had a lot of emails from people who have seen the project and shared their own stories with me, saying they feel relieved they are not alone, and it's incredibly clear to me that they have struggled to admit these feelings even to their closest friends.Probably because of the mere fact I've made a book about it, a few of my friends have spoken to me about struggling with similar feelings and my advice is always to avoid looking at them online or to block that person to avoid the temptation of doing so. There seems to be this incredible habit we have to indulge ourselves in the things that hurt us. I have one friend who listened to the advice when she was going through a breakup and I really admire her strength. She made a conscious decision not to dwell on things and to do what was best for her, so she blocked him. There was still this deep desire for her to know what stage he was at in his life; if he'd met anyone else, and she missed him of course, but she stood by her decision because she knew in the long run it wasn't a healthy platform to have access to at such a time. I honestly believe she moved on a million times quicker because of it. It's very unhealthy to continue to see the person you are trying to move on from on social media every day – it's impossible to think that wouldn't negatively effect you, when it gives them such a presence. I think I learnt that the hard way, but tried to create something positive from the experience, which was one of the main drives of the project for me.I think it's probably the same feeling with most ex's and new partners, it can feel uncomfortable. Nobody wants to imagine their partner having ever been with anyone else prior, but I don't think it's ever anything personal. I can certainly relate to it from both sides – my partners have usually had ex girlfriends too!It was an incredibly cathartic experience and at times a real roller coaster. When the project was finished I found the thought of sharing it initially very daunting. I didn't have much time to digest that at the opening night of the exhibition. However, the entire experience of making the work turned a time where I was really struggling into something I am very proud of.Not Photoshopping the stain out and including this in the series was to address this idea of being able to construct how we're seen through photography and online. Being able to retouch our flaws and present ourselves perfectly to the world causes a lot of the problems within social networking. It allows us to think everyone else is better off, happier, more together than us and leaves us with a constant sense of inadequacy. Personally I think being able to show your weaknesses is a strength. The friend in the photograph is an amazingly strong character, who I know is also incredibly comfortable with themselves, so despite them asking me to edit it out, I knew they wouldn't be too disappointed that I hadn't.If you'd asked me at the time, perhaps I would have had a better answer for you. I think I always knew the project would end with him. I wanted answers for how we'd ended and I'd imagined he'd be able to give them to me.It's something I feel that we haven't particularly been able to culturally address. It seems as though we're all a bit overwhelmed by the power of social media and we struggle to manage its direct impact on us as individuals and on our relationships.I think the internet can have an incredibly empowering social and political presence for voices struggling to be heard. However, for many of us in the western world, the internet has become a platform on which we create and maintain real life relationships at the same time as self promoting, alluding to a version of ourselves that is impossible to depict from reality. From the comfort of my own bed I am able to post a picture of myself standing on top of a mountain, as if in real time. When everybody is doing this and appears to be living such polished and exciting lives, we all suffer from a constant state of inadequacy. When you see this for the artificiality of it all, you realise in reality it is often the most active online presences that perhaps have the least genuine lives. And perhaps by acknowledging this, we are able to participate without being consumed, and we can release ourselves from its negative grasp.At the moment I am working on a new series exploring my relationships with my sister (a painter) and my boyfriend (a writer) as we transition through each other's work via the interplay of fact and fiction.For me a picture is about a feeling that it conveys, I can look at a composition and be blown away, but for me an interesting picture is one that raises questions.You can follow Imogen on Instagram @imogenfreeland