I’m thinking of coming back to Twitter. Idk why exactly other than it feels like exposure therapy of some sort. I was never super active or had a large following, but there was a point in like 2019 where using this website seemed to be doing SOMETHING good for me & I liked that.
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2- Idk what happened after, but I gradually distanced myself when it started to feel like poison. I could outline the specific contours of that, most are pretty legible to me at this point, but that’s maybe too personal (and rambly!) for this sort of pointless announcement….
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3- Anyway, it started to feel bad, so I left & rarely checked back other than a select few accts I trusted to have good and safe vibes + interesting things to say. But even opening the app for that was a big deal, requiring emotional bandwidth, & I’d feel shitty afterward.
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4- All of this was pretty subtle, btw. But I’ve spent most of the last three years trying to get better at noticing the subtle stuff, & the better I got at noticing, the more irredeemably & intensely bad Twitter felt relative to other things I interact with.
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5- I’m a pretty online person, so there’s something in all of this that makes me kinda sad. For me, the magic of social media has almost always happened in the DM’s.
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6- To get DM’s I have to occasionally/sporadically post actual thoughts that ppl might read & interact w/ other ppl’s thoughts that might be wrong/bad/stupid/toxic to me & both those make me feel more vulnerable than I remember feeling as a pretty online person 5-10 yrs ago.
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7- There’s a combination of feelings around this like, I probably do have higher emotional bandwidth now, I can explore the bad feelings I get w/o destabilizing myself; there were good things here for me before, I met ppl who turned into irl friends…
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8- so maybe it’s worth trying to sort out my toxic relationship w/ this site so I can use it for actual connection again. I might try doing that. Or I might post this & never come back. Either way, my DM’s have always been open. :)
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