Image by Naturelady from Pixabay

Seems to be a common thing these days, being a little more high strung and quick to pounce. Join a particularly contentious election year with a pandemic (and serious divisions as to how to fight it, avoid it, and live with it) and you’re bound to stumble into that, and its cousin —anger.

I quit social media entirely last September after I had a near-miss. A tweet I’d made was misinterpreted by someone who was concerned enough about it to mention it in an email to several people where I am employed, but oddly, wasn’t concerned enough about it to contact me personally. It wasn’t a Karen moment, just an ill-thought-out blurt. Unwise, but not fireable. Still, it made me think very carefully about whether social media was really worth the time I spent on it. Whether it was worth the second thoughts every time I wrote a post. Check my followers list, try to read it through their eyes. Make sure I was being clear, kind, wise, and speaking grace. Being that I was in the throes of my first semester teaching, I decided fairly quickly that it wasn’t worth the worry. I deleted my Facebook and my Twitter.

I found that once I got that knee-jerk sit-at-computer-type-facebook.com reflex out of my system, I didn’t miss it. Much. Okay, I missed a few of the friends —acquaintances and people I knew long ago and/or far away — but I really didn’t miss the format. I didn’t miss the foolish posts, the pot-stirrers, the “copy and paste this…,” the cute kitten posts. I certainly didn’t miss the nagging in my mind about whether the thing I’d posted earlier that day would get the wrong kind of attention.

But I started this new corner of the blogosphere in December, looking for a place of my own, a place where I could write in more than 144 characters or however many Twitter allows these days. Granted, I don’t really have an audience yet, but I’m working on it. And one of those ways, I decided, to build an audience was to return to Twitter. It’d been so long that they really actually did delete my account, so I had to start over. I’ve enjoyed it for the most part, but most of the time I’ve spent there, I’ve had my account set so that only my followers can read my tweets. I reassembled my follow list, found the people whose comments I found either interesting or edifying or thought-provoking. Twitter’s a great resource for writers. It’s a great way to get advice from people I’ll never meet in person, to get a glimpse into their everyday normal life. So, I reactivated. But I still sort of regret it sometimes.

With starting a new account comes the anxiety of posting and replying again. I’ve started a new habit of deleting my old posts at the end of the month, knowing all the while that when they say “the internet is forever,” they mean it.

And that takes me back around to the whole enormous risk anyone takes when they write. Now, this place feels safe to me. My audience of five (on a good day) isn’t terribly commentary. I haven’t started any arguments here, but it feels like a place where there’s more context. I have more space and more time and the ability to edit. But writing at all is always a risk. Where I land at the end of the argument with myself over whether to leave my words out there hanging on the page or in the air or on the forever internet is the fact that no matter how carefully I write, there’s always the possibility someone’s going to misread me. Take offense. Get hurt. It’s happened before. I’d be willing to bet that every seasoned writer has a story of such things happening.

Intent is a tricky thing. I can have all the best intentions and deeply wound someone with my words. A knife is a knife. I can be innocently cutting a slice of bread and catch my finger. My intent —to slice the bread— doesn’t stop the bleeding or the pain. I think words can be the same way. But then, the wound is sometimes a teacher also. Next time, I think as I head for the cabinet for a bandage, I’ll hold my knife differently. Next time, I’ll know better. Maybe it’s the same way with Twitter.

I sure hope so. For now, I can live with the anxiety. Maybe one day I won’t and my account will disappear, but today, the learning experiences are worth the risk.

“Do the best you can until you know better. Then when you know better, do better.”

—Maya Angelou