Applications Blog 2: Posting Saved My Life

Twitter changed my life, man. It really changed everything for me. Posting changed me. When I was a kid, it was like, I had this idea of, if I shared everything about myself, how could anyone blame me? I could absolve myself of everything, all those weird thoughts you have as a kid you don't really understand or know what to do with. In my high school relationships, this turned out to be a disaster. This level of constant expression does not fly in the real world.

I began to engage more online as my IRL small town relationships fell away in college, and the prospect of meeting an extended community on the internet who "really got me" became more of a possibility. Initially, I began posting on private Discords for podcasts I was interested in, playing the social game of going deeper and deeper into the wells of ever nicher communities. After grinding through this style, I took some mutuals and began to post more publicly on Twitter.

I remember where I was as the pandemic set in. I have some followers and was in private communication with several. I remember being engaged in this rapid flow of information, the linear, time-based "feed" with the ability to throw more and more into it without repercussions due to my rapid pace of engagement. I would just post and post and post and post and write about myself and write and write and write anything I could, any words I could drag out. I wrote, and after I wrote them I thought up more and continued to write. Emotionally, I found it very satisfying and addictive to have every single thought I produced seen and interacted with, sometimes to great success.

For the next few years I continued, meeting more and more people, more and more of whom transitioned from online to IRL. During this period of creation, I met my current partner and several friends who I still know today. Ultimately though, my thumb wore out and began to ache. Writing in that mode had taken a toll on my body. My mind as well suffered as my thoughts began to conform to the medium. Eventually, the app degraded and was forever changed into a crazy right wing echo chamber. Posting became financially commodified. Things came to an end when my partner and I moved to New York because I was no longer socially isolated and could engage with people in real life easily.

Ultimately, the driving force which I found to be so powerful was writing and sharing writing and engaging in a creative process that was public and collaborative and open and freely expressive.