Sea of Lost, Pained Souls
“Maybe the Internet raised us
Or people are jerks”
The other day there was concern Twitter was going to fall into a black hole and that would be the end of the website for good. Over the past couple of years I’ve posted on it less and less, so I wasn’t too bummed about it falling into the pit of hell due to the incompetence of Elon Musk, the dumbest man child alive. The pandemic really did ruin the site for me before Musk yanked at the reigns. It also made me examine how I post online and on social media in general. I’ve become way more discerning of what the public gets to see—is this something I only want a few people to know about me? If I were charged for something, would I be willing to defend this in a court of law? Is this funny in general or just funny to me?
In 2020, I knew the election cycle on the bird site would kill my mental health. Little did I know at that time there was a pandemic looming around the corner and there would be worse things ahead, but I knew there were people I followed who I also knew in real life who were really going to drive me to insanity. It was also making these people unbearable to even speak with, both online and in real life. So I started to etch out an escape plan to wean myself off the site, as well as the people who couldn’t stop posting all the time. And not like the stupid/funny kind of posting, but the attention seeking posting like, “Here’s the same piece of shitty art I keep trying to sell to a niche market for the past three years because I am trying to become a grifter but completely suck at it” or “Here’s a story I’ve retold ten million times because my glory days were when I was 17 and got drunk once and did something stupid that may have been funny once upon a time ago, but is now just tired” or brag about “political organizing” with a Leftist organization by sharing pictures of the same event (I was in a couple of those pictures and they were hardly flattering), which was an off day where some of us drank on the beach on the Fourth of July and no organizing was involved. It made them feel like they were doing something, I suppose. It was just a sad sight for me because they wanted to be cool so badly, but they were too uncool to ever achieve that status. I guess for many years I just felt bad for them.
I eventually got blocked by them for what I can only assume was a joking tweet that they took to heart. It’s not the first time I’ve hurt someone’s feelings by what I may deem as a harmless joke but someone else takes in an insulting manner—I’m human, and I fuck up. I actually laughed because they just soft blocked me to remove me from their followers list—made no attempt to contact me to say my joke was mean or anything. I realized the “friendship” was merely transactional. Friends in the past have confronted me about the times I’ve hurt their feelings, and I’ve immediately apologized to them for being insensitive and mean. But this person was too immature to do that, and it confirmed to me that they may have also secretly hated me, too. They acted like a frenemy to me—compliments that were backhanded, as if they always had something to prove to me. I got the last guffaw when I guested on a relatively popular podcast and was advertising it on Twitter and they full on blocked me. I guess they had no interest in seeing me succeed. That didn’t bother me. What really bothered me was weeks later when they subtweeted me and my brother caught wind of it and asked me what happened. Not only was my own fucking sibling privy to this, but so were the people I organized with. People I stood side by side with at protests, mutual aid events, chapter meetings, reading groups, etc. I was convinced these people hated me, too. I felt ostracized, alone, and hated, as if these people now viewed me differently because one woman was made to look stupid for a brief moment and got her feelings hurt in the process. The worst part was I couldn’t defend myself. I didn’t want to stoop to her level, and I don’t think anyone defended me in the process. I guess that’s what hurt the most—people who actually knew me didn’t stand up for me. After that, the website was tainted. I deleted my account, I couldn’t stand being on the same website as this one person and knowing the people who I organized with were siding with her. They were guilty by association.
I eventually realized that as a podcaster, it was helpful to have my own account if I was going to advertise the podcast. I hated it, still do. These days I don’t even have the time to really do social media to advertise, but at least if there is some online presence, I’m making the effort to interact with avid listeners while trying to wrangle in new listeners. It’s a fine line and I wish I made enough money to pay someone to do that shit so I can just focus on content and editing. I eventually added some of the people from my organizing past to the website since a few people from that time in my life managed to find me, but I don’t interact with them so much anymore. I limit it and only comment if I feel compelled to. In a way, I still see them in a different light and it’s just kind of weird. Some don’t interact with me at all, either, and I’m assuming they just added to be nice or hate look at my tweets. I don’t know why they just unfollow me. It would be preferable than them weirdly lurking at my tweets.
This is the most I’ve spoken about it. I knew speaking out about it on the bird site would make me look bad for a number of reasons— a woman of color making a white woman cry. A white woman’s tears is worth its weight in gold and despite people knowing me on a personal level, I knew who was going to win that fight and it was definitely not going to be me. For some reason, people like her and I’m sure they like her more than me for reasons I cannot explain. I find her to be absolutely the Obnoxious and Grating White Woman, but I guess there are some people who find that be charming and endearing. Go figure. I spoke with this in more detail with my close friends, who were supportive and agreed this woman is cringe and has issues that need to be treated by professionals. I just don’t like people talking behind my back. I don’t want to say it’s creepy, but it also kind of is. I am not someone who attracts a whole lot of attention so the fact I managed to get into the crosshairs of a 40 something year old woman who is unhinged just rubbed me the wrong way.
All of this is to say I made my peace with the bird site dying years ago. I’ve migrated to Instagram since then, which is nicer even though I still stumble upon tweets on that site, unfortunately. But I get to post pictures and forget politics exist. I also get to avoid straight up cringe and stuff that Makes Me Feel Icky.
I had a good conversation with my brother about this yesterday. He has also gotten himself off the website for about a year now. He started studying Japanese on his own, which has taken up a lot of his time. When I told him how everyone was saying their goodbyes on Twitter, it lead us to talking about how many people just overshare way too much on the website. Again, I am human, but I was notorious for doing this back in 2017 when I was glued to the website, and again during the early days of the pandemic. It wasn’t until I saw the Unhinged White Lady do this incessantly where it was almost like looking into a mirror and I was seeing how I looked in the eyes of other people when I shared something super personal online. It felt like that scene in I Heart Huckabees where Jude Law’s character gets a report about how many times he told the same anecdote about a tuna fish sandwich that made him look clever and was funny that made him throw up because he realized just how cringe it was to gloat about something that virtually meant nothing at the end of the day. That’s what it felt like to me looking at this White Woman’s tweets. That’s when I started reconsidering how I was using social media.
I think it’s one thing tweeting you deal with depression as a way to remove stigma from talking about mental health, it’s another to do a ten tweet thread about your suicide attempts and all the past traumas you've endured. Does the entire world need to know the gory details? Is this something you should talk to a professional about? For a long time I thought that was what vulnerability was. I felt as if that was what was going to make me more vulnerable, but after going into therapy I realized it’s not vulnerability, it’s oversharing, which are two different things. Oversharing to the world wide web isn’t intimacy, it’s just another way to avoid intimacy, and make people feel uncomfortable in the process. Seeing tweets on my timeline doing the act of oversharing has just made me feel icky and gross. After that, I kind of realized how frivolous it is to post such intimate details about yourself that can be found through a quick Google search. At that point, what is left when you truly want to be intimate with another person? Social media can be a useful tool, and hell, even fun if that’s what you put into it.
After that, I made sure to be careful with the kind of tweets I compose. I now use it to talk about film, music, and pop culture. I keep the personal out of it as much as possible. My brother made the excellent point in this conversation that it’s not healthy to know everyone’s opinions about everything and how it would make a medieval peasant’s brain explode if they ever time traveled to the future and discovered Twitter on their own. Social media has become a purgatory. There was a time when Twitter was fun and it really could be funny, lighthearted and dumb. But when you have access to the news in a 24/7 news cycle, your brain will eventually become poisoned and you will hate yourself and everyone else. Yesterday I saw “Chili” trending and through a quick search, I realized someone made a 40 tweet thread about how some Good Samaritan made chili for her neighbors because it seemed as if they weren’t eating a whole lot of home cooked meals and would probably appreciate something home cooked. Apparently this person was Bad because of ableism…? Or they were using ableism as an excuse to just be anti-social and shitty. I don’t know and I didn’t care enough to investigate it further, but that’s the kind of brain poisoning that happens when we’re online too much.
These days I’ve been making more of an effort to go out and log on to Twitter less. My mental health is better, I don’t feel so bad about humanity and I don’t mind interacting with people in real life. The pandemic made me agoraphobic for such a long time, it’s nice to just go outside, feel the sunshine on my face, the wind in my hair while listening to my favorite music as I ride on public transit. It really does wonders when you have a life outside of a site where you can post anything within a 240 character limit. So if the website dies tomorrow, I’ll be okay. As long as I’m still able to have other outlets to write and post pictures, I don’t really give a good God Damn what Elon Musk does with the damn place.
During the last part of my conversation with my brother yesterday, I made the comment of how social media has turned the landscape into a “Sea of Lost. Pained Souls”. My brother’s comment:
Is that what the sea of lost, pained souls is calling for? Yuck.