I Was Never Any Good at Twitter

It Also Didn’t Feel Good

A few weeks ago, without fanfare (because who cares), I was lying on my couch watching the end credits of The Social Dilemma, which I’d somehow never sat down and watched, and just kind of sighed and scrolled through the labyrinth of settings and menus until I found the place where you go to delete your Twitter (“X”) account. Still without thinking much, I did it, somehow overriding all the dumb old barriers that had prevented me from doing it before.

Those feelings… Most of them were careerist and sad, emotional radiocarbon emissions of desperation. 2011, when my book editor suggested it might help sell books (it didn’t). 2013, when I thought people who’d never so much as raised an eyebrow at my name might take notice after several awkward subtweets about how I worked in Hollywood now (they didn’t… or maybe it’s better to say that subtweets were so apparent to practiced users of twitter, I just came off as a needy recreation of thousands of other people just like me).

While I had a very fun time on twitter in the months before and after Station Eleven came out, when I felt I was able to use it to shine a real beam, with a janky flashlight, into the corners of the highly self-selected internet quadrant of people who might like the show— the areas that Station Eleven’s less-than-overwhelming marketing campaign had been able to reach, at a time when so many potential audience-members were too traumatized by the pandemic to even watch the show, anyway— my one and only takeaway from my eleven years on twitter is that it almost universally made me unhappy, and almost never led me down a psychological road that felt healthy, or even healthier.

In fact, the most notable data point of those twelve years (beyond observing that the only way to do Twitter well, for me, was to point to other things people said about something I had worked on, rather than to wave my arms and say Look at this pleeeassseee!) was the change in my own behavior that settled onto me like a weighted blanket, once I’d gotten a job on the staff of The Leftovers.

I didn’t care anymore.

In those first (not easy!) weeks of trying to find my place in The Leftovers writers’ room, I forgot about twitter, and all of social media; I stopped checking it, I stopped posting, I stopped saying anything via that forum. It was a change that felt both final and neurochemical; I literally didn’t think about saying, “Here is who I am and here is what I am doing.” At the time, I noticed that my interest in posting had suddenly vanished, but I didn’t think about it a lot. In the time since then, I’ve thought about it a lot.

Now almost a decade away from that moment, the very simple way to say it is that joining The Leftovers writing staff constituted the first moment, in my life, that I had gotten to a place where I wanted to be, professionally. Everything I needed and wanted, psychologically and spiritually, was just happening, day by day, going to work. And with that satisfaction fulfilled for the first time in my life, my interest in social media plummeted.

I’m a nicotine-addict, and a smoker, and so maybe this will make sense to anyone who smokes: it was the uncanny feeling of suddenly not caring about smoking. I forgot about it. It didn’t infect my thoughts at all. I still used twitter as a kind of RSS feed of journalists through the years of Trump’s slow rise, the awful election, and that period of discomfort of 2017, when so much was changing but when we couldn’t quite see how or why, but in that time, when so much incredible creative sustaining was happening in that writers’ room, I just had nothing to say.

I was pleased by this. This, to me, felt more like the exorcism of an unwanted demon, and it felt real because my mind literally wouldn’t go to it, or take me to the app… my imagination wouldn’t try to come up with “something to say” that would be liked. I was wholly taken and preoccupied with what Nora, or Kevin, or anyone else in the show had to say, and all of that was more important than me.

Like I said, I did become extremely active again on Twitter when Station Eleven came out, and it felt like a powerful way to both promote the show, but also reiterate my own perspective on how the show came to be, but all of those posts and activity came from a much ego-less place; I wanted to use the platform to distribute information that felt important, but authentically not to promote myself, or my career. Just to promote the show.

I think right now, the platform has become strange and uncomfortable in a new way. But I’m not writing any of this in a, “Why You Should All Leave Twitter” stance; I am honestly still unpacking and confused by why it ever became as emotionally important to me— to be liked enough by enough people, to matter, to have followers, to be able to reach the media— and I am also grappling, sometimes, with the idea of losing that platform, and all those people listening.

But were they listening? Or did they actually care?

The fact that I still don’t care that I don’t have a place to go to say one sentence here or there, or make a promise about the Mojave Desert, or provide some kind of alt to a headline about my work, or someone else’s work, is more telling than anything.

My self-worth feels stable and what it is because of the work I’ve done over the years— slow, hard, frustrating, real work— and untethered from social media, or its reaction to what I say there. I can’t say I had the confidence to think that was on a A-side.

I feel lucky, and privileged, to be able to quit the thing that didn’t really make me happy. And at the same time I feel alarmed that it’s a privilege.

It’s easy to say, “Elon Musk ruined Twitter.” It’s much harder to say that we allowed something like FarmVille, of the competitive and very successful Book It! Pizza Hut reading program from the 80s, to dominate the meaning of discourse.

It is so hard to break through. And I love almost every story of somebody using social media to find a place for themselves, and get around the barriers that exist to even get heard.

Holy shit, though… it’s uncomfortable out there. Uncomfortable and probably unnecessary.