Yes, I went with a fart joke for my title. It's going on 2AM, after which nothing good happens, and while waiting for my sleepytime supplements to kick in (my chronic insomnia situation of which probably would be better served by prescription medications I never have the time or energy to seek out properly), I'm gathering my thoughts on Twitter and its potential crash tonight. I still wonder if the whole point of buying Twitter in the first place wasn't just to pave over Toontown and build a freeway.
Not unlike recognizing one's own mortality, I've come to consider how much stock I really put in Twitter these last seven years. Not actual stock, or else I'd probably be pretty unhappy right now outside of my typical misery, but I mean just how much of my personal life has become cemented there. I viewed Twitter with ample dismissal in the beginning. Despite starting my account in 2009, I didn't really start using it regularly until 2013 after my mother died. Before that, I'd been on Facebook, and pretty much all of my friends there were from my previous Internet life in file-sharing chatrooms. Those chatrooms, particularly one devoted to sharing and preserving MST3K episodes years before any of them had DVD releases, were a hefty portion of my life, but they began to dwindle as years went on. Conversation died off, politics reared the ugliest heads ever, and losing my mom changed me inside. It was a gradual shift, but eventually I turned off the chatroom software, logged out of Facebook, and never came back. I wasn't that person anymore, and I'd also come to find that most of the people I knew there were... the reason you hear a lot of people on Twitter giving their reasons for leaving Facebook. I won't go into any more detail than that other than to say I did not fall on the 2016 voting side of most of my Facebook friends. It made me feel awful just to cut ties like that, but I couldn't even begin to think of how to start a conversation with many of these people I'd known through shared entertainment interests for a dozen years.
They knew how I felt about their voting choice at the end of a lengthy FB post that I treated with much the same feeling as this post tonight: what if it's over? That FB post was on the night of the oncoming Hurricane Harvey, and at the time my future was very much uncertain... so I just let it all out. After reading one reply offering hope that I would weather the storm (layered with thinly-veiled disdain for my political opinions and almost dismissing them outright as hysterics), I felt like I knew where I truly stood there after all those years. I felt like I didn't belong, so I left and never looked back. I won't speculate where their support might have led them nor will I speak ill of them. At some point, regardless of everything, I considered us friends. On the other hand, some of those friends knew how to get in touch with me outside Facebook and never tried. Maybe the feelings of not belonging were mutual. For me, that part of my life is over, and all I can do is leave it at that. I was just there to riff on movies and TV shows, for Pete's sake, the same thing I do largely on Twitter now.
Which brings me here again tonight. What if Twitter is over? It's hitting 2AM as I type this sentence, and Twitter is still up. I don't know. What I do know is that I was on the verge of a nervous breakdown when I started using Twitter more frequently in late 2014/early 2015 and planning to delete the app entirely, but some really good people convinced me to stay. I would eventually have that nervous breakdown in 2019, and it was only those same people I'd met on Twitter who offered any level of support to help me through it. I was on hold with a Houston area crisis hotline that day for 45 minutes. No one ever answered. If not for laughing off the completely disgusting ineptitude of the people running the crisis lines that day with my Twitter friends, things might have been worse. I wasn't suicidal, but I was depressed and exhausted. I needed help, and my Twitter friends supported me.
I needed professional help and probably still do, but I never sought it that day. I am just now finding myself in a position to seek that sort of help for myself. Those wheels of progress have turned very slowly, but they have turned. Regardless, I learned through my Twitter friends that I shouldn't be afraid to seek help, and I shouldn't be afraid to speak out. As much as my Twitter "persona" is just a fraction of the real me and "playing a character" to some extent, it is a fraction of myself that has instilled greater courage and confidence in me as a whole. I'm thankful to Twitter for that. In some ways, it made me stronger. It made me care less about what other people think about me, and I gotta tell you that caring about what other people think of me was crippling me for a very long time. I'm still very unhappy and depressed, but the road to help for some of those issues has become a lot less foggy lately.
In the meantime, a big chunk of my Twitter life has been livetweeting. It's what revived this blog and gave it a new name, and I have never walked away from livetweeting. I don't plan to, even with many of my livetweets of late playing to a completely empty house. I won't lie and say it doesn't sting a bit to livetweet alone, but I maintain that people showing up isn't the real point. If I'm solo at 10PM E on a Friday night, then so be it. The show goes on, and I also maintain that some of the people who inspired me to get into it were already doing the things I would have done as a more prevalent and proliferate livetweet host, and they continue to do it much better than I would have and deserve the community audience they have (you know who you are). For me, livetweeting is a routine that helps preserve my sanity by sharing things I love... and those things I find increasingly less time to enjoy myself outside of those particular livetweet hours with my life as a primary caregiver.
I doubled up on my sleepytime supplements tonight, and they decided to hit rather quickly. Insert Liam Neeson impression here. "There's no time! There's no time!" Rather than make this longwinded half-asleep rambling, I do need some sleep to prepare for some of those life situations tomorrow. Of course, I stared at this post like a zombie and robbed myself of another hour of sleep before finally posting it. It's after 3AM now, and Twitter is still there. In any case, even if Twitter doesn't crack, I hope to post more musings here more often. Maybe I'll even get around to finishing that Godzilla fanfic (probably not) or maybe even just post a few chapters of a young adult sci-fi novel I'll never finish.
Heaven forbid I have to consider becoming a content creator on any of the other half a dozen social sites I use just to fill the void Twitter left. I don't have any talent as an entertainer outside of years of practice at riffing and witty cross-references. I'm definitely too old for TikTok, and I have a real "face for radio" mentality with regard to becoming a content creator in general. I have to get my thoughts out of my head somewhere, and I don't currently have the software to build myself a VTuber avatar of a gorilla in a tunic.
All of my various and mostly-empty social endeavors are here on https://linktr.ee/sonofkaras.
No comments:
Post a Comment