#qwitter

Last night, Twitter crossed a line for me, and I said I was going to take time away. This isn’t the first time this has happened. I think the last time I intended to quit in earnest was when Tr**p tweeted about his button being bigger than Kim Jong Un’s. It terrified me. It hit me in this visceral place of fear and I found myself going back to Twitter again and again to get an update, find out the latest, see what the fuck was going on. I realized that going to Twitter had evolved from being an inclination to an impulse, and even though it made me feel bad I kept going back for more.

I know this behavior well. Compulsive, addictive, and out-of-control. Something that started out as a fine time, as a diversion, but turned into something much more sinister. It’s the same thing that took me from a casual drug user into having a drug problem at one time.

I’m inclined to go into all the details of that here, and I’m also not. This is about knowing when a habit becomes a problem, when the bad outweighs the good, and when you have to make some kind of commitment to yourself to make it better.

I was around for old Twitter. I’ve been on the platform for over 10 years. I got to know my city better. Made actual, IRL friends. I discovered pop-ups before they were a thing. I’ve made connections in my career, deepened my friendships, live-tweeted awards shows and baseball championships (I miss this), and connected with people all over the world. I’ve been validated via retweets from heroes and mentors, gotten a boost of likes by way of @darth and @karlthefog, and found a place to connect, to converge, to literally laugh and literally cry.

I think I read somewhere that social media engagement, the likes and retweets that we all love, that it gives a little hit to your dopamine receptors. Those very same bits of the brain I was once hammering with pills. It’s not surprising that Twitter is addictive. For a long time, we went there and got a little hit. Pulled to refresh and saw our feed filled with friends and puppies and funny people. It felt good. It became a habit.

But then the waters got murky. Bad news and bad people were taking the same place once filled with good things, and it got confusing. The same behavior had a different outcome, but the neural pathways had already been determined. “See New Tweets” means Feel Good Things. And the good things might still happen, just enough to keep us wanting more, coming back, pulling to refresh again.

Quitting opiates is fucking hard. I had to face what it was that I was washing in dopamine, own up to the closest people to me the depths of my addiction, and deal with some pretty insane mood swings. There’s a lot more I can tell you, but that’s not what I’m here for. But deciding to quit was the hardest, first step. Telling my doctor to not write me another prescription was nearly impossible. But I committed myself to it, and I stuck with it.

I think I have to do the same with Twitter, and it fucking sucks. I worked at Twitter because I loved Twitter, and I left the company when I had truly lost hope. I lost hope that there would be change, or that I could make an impact. It was time.

It’s been a strange 24 hours. The bullshit tweets from Jack came out, I wrote an off-hand tweet in response, and then I tried to quit. I logged out, and I changed my password to a phrase that, when typing it, made me very conscious of what I was choosing to do. To opt in to something that might be harmful, that was doing more bad than good.

But then that thing happened. I logged back in this morning. Not with compulsion, but with caution. Seeing if that fomo feeling was real, and was it worth it. And then I got it. That goddamn engagement dopamine hit. That one off-hand tweet has been seen by nearly 60k people, and is getting lots of likes and retweets. I got that hit again, and I kept coming back through the day for more, and all I got was bad news, bad ideas, bad actors.

Then I came to one more tweet. This one from Twitter Safety. They are condoning bigotry. It’s right there, in the official policy. This is the last straw. My ethics bell has been struck, and for me, this is bottom. I have to be done. I have to quit.

I’m not going to shut off my account. I’m going to hold out the hope that this can be turned around. That policy is changed, bad actors are kicked off, and Jack is shown the door. But I am going to log out. I am going to take it off my phone. I am going to be incredibly intentional and cautious about my activity there. I’ll stick around for a couple days, but then I have to be done.

I’m putting this down to make it real, to hold myself accountable (but not asking you to do anything). If I’m strong enough to quit the damn drugs, I can quit a social media platform. It shouldn’t be that hard, but it is, I know it.

Stay in touch. Find me here, email me if you’d like. Instagram is fine too. I’m wordstern all around, and I really, really hope I’ll be able to be back on Twitter one day.