[AE.Personal] Yielding the Stage, or, the *Other* Kind of Lockdown
The lede: In the next few days, I'm going to be taking my Twitter account private ("locking"), for an undetermined length of time, and for reasons I'll get into below.
For those not conversant with Twitter's workings, this means that people who are following me will be able to read and interact with my tweets as normal, albeit that you won't be able to retweet them. They'll show up in your timeline. You'll be able to reply to them.
This impending change requires no action from anybody. If you're already following me on Twitter, you'll still be following me after I lock. If you're not following but would like to keep access to my tweets for the duration (to be determined; I have no firm plans about the timeframe)
My reasons for doing this are complicated and personal, to the point that the first draft of this message was an attempt to weigh out the pros and cons. I made it about halfway through a rough draft when I noticed a pattern: all the pros were about things I want or need, and all the cons were about things I was afraid might happen.
So the question I was grappling with, in the final analysis, wasn't "Is it worth locking my Twitter account for a bit?" but "Should I let my fears stop me from doing what I want, what I feel is necessary and in my best interest?" and when I put it in those terms, all the reasons not to just became more reasons to do it.
So, here's why I'm doing it, with what scares me mixed in as seasoning:
1. I want to make a clean break between the phase of my life where my life and livelihood was 100% about being plugged into politics, news, and Twitter so I can start figuring out what the next phase of my life is. I've never in my life made the kind of money I made at the height of all that and I don't expect to do so again any time soon, but it was never going to be sustainable in the long term, the world has changed, and so have I. Now I really need to give myself some space to figure out what I'm doing instead, and focus on it.
It's scary to acknowledge that I'm walking away from the thing that kept my lights on and my family fed for five years or so. And to be clear, this doesn't mean I'm declaring myself disinterested in politics or saying I'm done commenting on it. But I lost the spark and focus needed to be Your Weird Twitter Politics Mom Friend around the end of 2020 and I don't think it's fruitful or healthy for me to try to get that exact same fire back.
I need to find the next fire, and the sooner I walk away from the embers of the last one, the faster I can do it.
2. I came into 2022 resolving to spend less of my time and energy engaging in pointless arguments with strangers on Twitter. I attribute some of my initial failure to keep this resolution to being sick and tired, as I alluded to in an earlier newsletter, but as I've recovered I've discovered that no matter how much willpower and discipline I exercise, the supply of strangers to argue with is infinite; if I ignore the more banal and commonplace temptations for snark and surliness, I spend more time engaging with people and situations who bring out the absolute worst in me, which is just the worst use of my time in terms of what it accomplishes for me or anyone else.
The thing about locking my account is that it frontloads the futility of snarking at or debating with strangers, as they won't be able to see what I'm saying. It's the closest thing I can do on Twitter to turning off my own ability to reply to people I don't know, which honestly sounds liek heaven to me.
The thing that scares me is that by taking away my ability to respond to the kinds of provocations I'm otherwise unable to ignore, I'm engaging in a bit of cowardice.
But as I've said a few times over the years, as advice to other people: the moment when you find yourself feeling like the weight of the world is on your shoulders and everything rides on you stepping up to save the day is exactly the moment to take a step back and turn away. Nothing good follows from that kind of thinking, and in the case of internet arguments, it's vanishingly unlikely to have any truth to it.
3. I want to live my life less in the public eye for a while and stop acting under a sense that being on Twitter is my job.
It's exhausting to be perceived. Things are a bit better with ADHD medication but I still find myself "wargaming" anything I might say, do, or reveal in public for all the ways I think it might be misconstrued, misused, or misunderstood. I want to spend some time just being a person online in a way I have not been in years.
And if my Twitter is a bit more of a personal social media page for a while... that might help me focus on the things I would like to constitute "my work", like my tabletop game projects (which I've started actually playtesting!) and my newsletter and my fiction.
The thing that I'm afraid of here is how the locking itself might be perceived; this item was on my cons list as "What will the neighbors think?" People usually lock for protection from something more external and concrete than their own worst impulses. I don't have any scandals or controversies or gaffes forcing me out of the spotlight and into the shadows; I'm just sick of the spotlight. But if enough people out there are ready to think the worst of me, I have no reason to believe they'd be unable to find or invent some "worst of me" sufficient to explain my absence. Even if the worst that comes out of it is a bunch of added scrutiny, that's the exact opposite of what I want.
But... if that happens, it happens? And I can deal with it when it happens, if it happens.
As I said above, the choice is between being ruled by hypothetical future fears or acting on my own desires and needs of the actual-factual present.
And when I consider it in that light, the choice is clear.
So, I don't know when I'll flip the switch, but I will be doing so. It might be tomorrow or the day after, it might be at the end of the week. I have no idea how long I'll stay locked. I've considered a week or two, or through the end of the month, or till some other arbitrary milestones, but I think the fact of the matter is that I won't know how long it will take me to get what I need until I'm getting it.
I came to the first draft of this message feeling a great deal of unease and anxiety, but after thinking it through and committing to it, I'm mostly feeling relief. When I do lock, I will put a prominent link to this post in my bio so that anybody who isn't following me and doesn't know what's going on can find out.
It's time to find out who I am when I'm not "on", and genuinely I'm looking forward to it.
-Alexandra