Why I Left Twitter and What's Next

CW: suicide, mental health, politics

I have tried six times to craft an explanation for my exodus from Twitter and its WritingCommunity. I get decently far and then things start to unravel. The problem is that the short version sounds like I just hate PC culture and the long version includes events related to specific people on twitter.

Despite whatever actions I've taken in the past, I'm not a fan of callouts. I think that pointing the finger at small accounts is far more dangerous than trying to cancel someone with millions of followers. Established influencers have a support system to get them through the hard times. Small accounts might be one bad day away from ending it all.

WRT PC culture, I feel like the only way to get around explaining those nuances are to actually talk about my politics. While I don't believe in the effectiveness of a representative democracy without checks against corporate interests, I am far closer to being a liberal than a conservative. The thing is, I grew up being abused and gaslit. I don't believe in blind faith nor unquestioned loyalty. So when my political party promotes mob rule and "with us or against us" ideologies, I'm going to call bullshit. I've been right of the left since BuzzFeed was making videos dunking on whites, men, and straight people for clicks. It's gotten me into a lot of absurd arguments, so I haven't wanted to talk about politics at all.

For people who've been following my blog, you'll know that I tried very hard to avoid being explicit about my politics. My goal was to promote my art first and foremost. The problem was that my identity wasn't something I understood. As an author, I don't know where my strengths are. I don't know what kind of person I am and that's kept me from knowing what kind of an artist I am. My identity is what's keeping me from not only being successful, but from being able to create.

This leads us into the main discussion, why did I leave Twitter?

Well, to some extent it goes back to why I joined in the first place. I watched Lindsey Ellis' "Manufactured Authenticity" and something in my brain clicked. I realized that if I'm going to be a writer, having a public persona is unavoidable. So I tried for a while to be this positive person that has enough of a spine to make jabs at people. I understood that we were all on Twitter to scratch each other's backs, and for a time it was fine.

As what happens to so many "weirdos," I got close to people and my intentions were misread. I'd been fighting my misanthropy for most of my life and that event made me want to leave twitter right there and then. People with borderline personality disorders and the neurodivergent have difficulty fitting into groups. Without facial cues, vocal inflections, and other non-verbal indicators, it's hard for them to get along with the world. The left especially was quick to attack anyone who spoke out in a way that they didn't approve. One wrong word or phrase, and I would be labelled undesirable.

Twitter's WritingCommunity has entire lists of undesireables, those they've labelled bigots for one reason of another. There is no trial. There is no appeal process. They simply put people on the list and encourage other tolerant progressives to shun. For me, I was getting blocked for using dog whistle phrases and trying to discuss the merits of arguments used to build up conservative ideology. For many, that was enough for them to conclude that I was a conservative. It didn't matter that I didn't have the intentions they thought I did. It didn't matter that I'd just stumbled into a talking point. It didn't matter that I didn't understand the larger context of that conversation, because the policy is to block first and ask questions never. In such a society, anyone who isn't "normal" is at a severe disadvantage.

I knew most of this going into Twitter in 2019, but I fooled myself into thinking that WritingCommunity was somehow separate from that mess. My interpersonal troubles made it harder and harder for me to stay on twitter and interact with people. I'd find some speaking out against mob rule, only to claim entire groups of people weren't worthy of empathy later. I'd connect with people who spoke of compassion and forgiveness, only to see them promoting and participating in callouts against people who have no way to defend themselves. Twitter brought my struggles with misanthropy up to suicidal levels of angst.

Yet, I convinced myself to stay on Twitter time and time again. I thought that the extremists would avoid me, but I might be able to sell my work and persona to like minded people. But moderates were getting squeezed out of those spaces. It became easier to talk to people in DMs and email, because no one wanted their opinions to be public. What's important here, is that I stayed on Twitter because I believed in my writing. I'd spent twenty years working on my craft and I was finally starting to write stories I could be proud of. I was producing the best work in my life, but I was producing less of it.

When I published Where Dragons Die, no one cared about the post. I got a handful of obligatory RTs, but of my eleven thousand followers, I didn't even have a single percent interested in what I'd created. People I had sent hundreds of DMs to didn't buy the book or express any interest in the story. When I held my first published book in my hand, it filled me with suicidal thoughts.

I understand that my mental health robbed that joy from me, but to say that Twitter had no effect on my reaction is naive. Going on twitter tested the limits of my coping mechanisms. It put me on the defensive and made me question all of my thoughts in a way that I hadn't done in over a decade. I sacrificed my happiness to try and promote my stories. My productivity was substantially less in 2019 compared to 2017-2018, because even when I was on breaks from twitter I was still devoting most of my mental energy to thinking about twitter. All I wanted to do was write and have people enjoy my stories, but I'd sacrificed one for the other and gotten nothing from it.

I know that I need help. I know that getting into therapy can help me. I know that it won't be an easy journey and that it could take years to find the right medication and a therapist that gets me. If I lived in another country, that would be the first step, but in America I don't have the money to get help. During my hardest month of 2019, I called close to a dozen low income mental health clinics in my area. There was no availability.

I have to survive this world on my own because I don't have the luxury of going to a therapist for my depression, anxiety, suicidal thoughts, etc nor the privilege of going to a physician to look at my GI tract, chronic sinus infection, or recent blood sugar spikes. You might that think that this makes me a natural ally to the left, but my lack of support means that I am prone to fits of rage, and month long stints where I disappear without so much as a warning because I'm constantly thinking about finding the cleanest way to end my life. I can't remember which talking points I'm allowed to bring up or which words are taboo because my brain is overwhelmed by cortisol. To anyone who thinks that I'm exaggerating, I got blocked simply for talking to people who didn't follow the invisible code of accepted words.

Yet when people on the left actually talk about healing the political divide, they are met with vitriol and entitlement. They think that healing the divide means shaking the bloody hand of the KKK because they're unable to consider the reality that using abilist language is NOTHING compared to the damage that their extremist stance on discourse does to people struggling with mental health. I KNOW that I'm not alone. I've talked to people going through the same problems. I've seen them leave twitter. I've listened to them explain why the political climate makes it untenable to write. Everytime they disappear, I can't help but wonder if they'll survive this round of holiday suicides.

Time and time again people said that I shouldn't care so much about what other people think about me on twitter, except for one thing: I was on twitter to find readers! What other people think of me was the entire point. I needed people to be interested in me because no one gives a shit about another book, let alone a self published one. How am I supposed to be a writer without engaging with my readers?

In 2020 I read a book of the year. The book was amateur. Everything from the prose to the plotting was fundamentally flawed, but the author had an audience. They had an entire online platform. They'd cultivated an audience of people that thought they knew the author, so they were a best selling author from pre-sales alone. The idea that I'm going to make it in a world of writers on the merits of my writing ability is a fantasy more unbelievable than Atlas Shrugged.

Somebody hands a reader two books. The first book is a concept that sounds kind of interesting by an author they know nothing about. The second book is written by a person they are emotionally invested in. Why would anyone read the second book before the first? I don't know. The hard truth is that given the same choice, I read the second book time and time again.

I will never be a best selling author if I'm unable to get people interested in my struggle. It sucks. It's not the life that I want, but writing has come to define me. So if I'm going to write, I need to get back to the basics: engage with the reader. I come from a background of fanfiction and forum RPs. I used to write, publish, and get feedback within a week. It focused my writing. It made my pacing fast and plotting extreme, but my weaknesses in grammar and syntax were always in the way of my success. I don't have a feel for what people want and I don't know which ideas I should be pursuing. The only way I'm going to move forward is if I can connect to readers again.

Here's the truth about Twitter, it's not a place for readers. Twitter, especially twitter's WritingCommunity, is where people come to promote themselves. Some build relationships. Some have the charisma to make people invested in their journey. I'm not that kind of person. I've never been the popular kid. I have always struggled to simply exist in a space. I'm too much of an iconoclast to build a platform by my personality alone and I don't have the mental health to sustain that lifestyle even if I wasn't.

I'm going to try to put my energy into Wattpad. I know that there's a love of sub-dom relationship play on there. I know that there's a lot of writers trying just as hard to promote their work as on twitter. But at least Wattpad is a writing first platform. Right now the plan is to do live readings on twitch and post analysis on YouTube. My hope is that I'll get feedback that helps me see what's working about my writing and what isn't.

I think the hardest part is going to be transparency. I'm going to have to show my face and voice. There's no way around it. I know that some people will judge me harsher because of my identifiers, but if my two years on Twitter taught me anything, it's that people don't like me because of who I am and not what I am.

What about Dragonguard?

Well, the book series that could will still be produced. I'm going to devote my time getting used to my commitment to Wattpad, Twitch, and YouTube. Hopefully, I'll be able to edit audio files during that process and if the need arises I'll take a break to draft book 2.