reflections on Twitter

some wildflowers

I’ve been active on Twitter since some time last spring—a full year and a bit. I reached a thousand followers in March, and attained the present count of nearly 3400 followers ten days ago. Suddenly, I’d had enough.

I started tweeting in order to validate my thoughts. As an adult, I have always felt the need to conceal the way I really feel, to add footnotes and disclaimers to my beliefs, to frame and reframe each statement until it’s simultaneously bulletproof and completely trivial. This is a frustrating thing. You feel like nobody understands you, because you don’t tell them who you are and how you want to be treated, because you’ve been taught that revealing what you really think usually results in sideways glances and nervous laughter and ignored messages and disinvitation from parties.

Twitter helped me break out of that cage. By writing thousands of honest tweets and receiving responses from many kinds of people, I was able to obtain a more balanced understanding of how my thoughts are perceived. I learned that the consistent social rejection that I had faced throughout my childhood was not a universal property of reality; rather, I had simply failed at a particular game that I had been coerced into playing for a brief period in the past. Using Twitter helped me learn that those experiences do not determine my future.

Another powerful consequence of tweeting, and of writing in general, is the unhindered self-examination it provokes. I would frequently read something and feel disgust or pity towards the pathetic creature that wrote it. Alas! It was I who wrote it. Marking a thought as my own places it under the protection of my ego. But written thoughts are further separated from the self, and may be subject to the same ruthless scrutiny that the external world receives. I learned a lot about my feelings about my thoughts by tweeting. I was able to further align my choices with my values.

Through interacting with hundreds of people, I also made some great friends, learned more about the world, and understood that my beliefs are shared by many, many others.

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Okay, so let me talk about the negatives.

First, the things that weren’t that bad. I don’t think I actually wasted that much time on Twitter; I view most of that time as spent productively, considering how much my quality of life has improved.

I haven’t been cancelled or rendered unemployable (so far as I can tell). The platform’s memory is extremely short, and the ability to lock your account gives you full control over who can see your tweets. People are also a lot more forgiving than I had previously assumed. There are many people who are casually dismissive, but very few who are vindictive. I think nearly everyone can safely post the majority of their opinions under their real name without worrying about the consequences. Tweets get people into trouble far less often than the media would have you believe.

The main issue with Twitter… I hesitate to call it an issue with Twitter, because the core of the problem is, as usual, human. Most people don’t like it when you win. They don’t like it when you take yourself seriously, when you chase goals that are beyond your station, when you attempt to become larger than you are. Most people would prefer that you remain small, cute, harmless.

This is intolerable to me.

Until now, I had mainly written about emotions, healing, introspection. I caused a fair amount of controversy, but I was certainly writing controversial things—I once said that I read so much fiction that most people are too boring to keep me engaged. I got a lot of hate, but it was hate from above: “look at how pathetic this person is, how little they know.” Hate from above, in the minds of the perpetrators, is often confused for kindness. “Correct your ways now, before it’s too late for you. We can help you.”

The other kind of hate is the attempt to hold a rocket down even as the engines light. It is the raw fury of those who already feel the clutching tendrils of defeat. It is a toddler’s tantrum: you can’t have anything that I don’t. This mode of thinking is amplified to a hideous degree on Twitter.

Now, as I attempt to slip the bonds of normalcy, as I reach for a transcendental freedom, I cannot afford to look backwards. The future demands my full attention. I cannot justify or explain what I am about to become. I may not even deserve the wonders I’m reaching for—but destiny says they will be mine nonetheless.

I will probably return to Twitter in a few weeks, or months, but something has changed forever.