Why I Just Deleted All My Tweets

Until last week I had ten and a half thousand tweets to my name.
I’d like to think that most of them were miniature snippets of blinding wit, comedic insight, and impeccable taste, but when I scrolled through my profile I quickly realised that wasn’t the case: when days and days of my quickly fired off tweets were read in succession it painted a picture of me that I wasn’t cool with.
My tweets were negative as fuck.
In the real world I’m no super-positive, happy camper, but jeeeeeeezus, my feed was a stream of minor complaints, major complaints, moans, groans, gripes, and a fairly consistent tirade of insults to the current President of the United States. I’m not ashamed about some of the Trump ones if I’m honest, but the whole 10.5k just had to go.
The world does not need my negativeness, and my followers certainly don’t. And I don’t really need it either. Reading my own tweets made me feel crap, and I was the one who wrote them in the first place. It’s probably not great when reading your own tweets causes mild depression.
I didn’t want these 140 character long bursts of anger / annoyance / aggravation to be a way to define me.
Like, what if I become Prime Minister of Britain in a few years time (very probably, almost definitely going to happen) and one of the awful newspapers (they’re all awful) scrolls through my twitter profile to get a feel for what I’m like? They’d quickly see that I seemingly hate everything, have a problem with controlling my anger, but I’m rather fond of Jaffa Cakes. And these things might all be true, but I’d like it if people worked that out by getting to know me for real, in person. Instead, anyone in the world can form an opinion of me based on what I called David Cameron at 01:54 on a Wednesday morning.
Why was I even awake at that time?
And why was I thinking of Cameron?
Ergh.
It’s one thing to worry about what strangers think of me, but I started to worry what my two kids would think if they found Dad’s tweets sometime in the future.
(I imagine they’ll be in the loft of our house in the year 2038 and they’ll stumble across my old laptop. They won’t have a clue what it is because they probably have holograms or just think things into reality by then, so they’ll blow all the dust off it, accidentally fire it up like in Jumanji, and be presented with something called ‘twitter’. It’s worth mentioning that in this story I probably got killed in the great alien war, defending earth and doing something incredibly heroic.)
I don’t want my daughter seeing the stuff my thumbs belched out at the early hours. I don’t want my son to see his Dad constantly swore at trolls over irrelevant stuff that didn’t even matter anyway.
And that’s the kicker — my online negativity is (was) irrelevant at best. Screaming through my fingers at Trump did not change Trump. Moaning about whatever irked me that day didn’t solve a thing.
Twitter’s like a big cave, and I was throwing a load of crap into it, upsetting all the other cave dwellers and not even making myself feel any better in the process. My tweets were not helping anyone. They were just cave crap.
So with that in mind, I decided to start again.
I don’t plan on being a born-again tweeter, ramming positivity down the throats of anyone who will listen. I won’t be the Cliff Richard of Twitter. He isn’t even on twitter so I suppose there is a gap that needs filling, but that’s not my job. I won’t be filling Sir Cliff’s gap anytime soon. Huh. Huh huh.
Instead, I’m just going to try and not be a dick. That’s it. I will try to not be a dick online.
It’s easy, when something pisses you off and you start to see red, to tap that blue app and fire off some venomous parcel of characters into the twitterverse. But I will try really hard to not do it from here on out. I won’t let myself spout profanities at wankers like Donald John Trump because it won’t help the matter. (Don’t get me wrong, I’ll still probably question almost everything he does, I just won’t be a dick about it.)
I suppose this is an apology to everyone that follows me, and has done since 2010 when I first joined The Twitter. Sorry, guys. I’ll be better now, I promise. Actually, I should probably try to apply this new mentality to life in the real world too, and means I need to apologise to everyone that knows me. This may take some time…
From now on, I want the world to look at my Twitter profile and just see a normal, not angry, person. Who ruddy loves Jaffa Cakes.
