Why I Deleted My Twitter
a story about sound.
I’ve never been diagnosed with an obsessive compulsive disorder, but it seems to be going around these days so I can’t be too sure.
I have lots of friends who seem to have it and I’ve also noticed some family members exhibiting weird tendencies that beg the question.
My craving to prove my opinions about various political topics and news items are the end all, be all capital-T Truth probably fits the bill.
The logic goes something like this: If I can prove my opinions are right, maybe I’ll feel secure, finally.
Finally I’ll feel worthy of love and belonging.
Maybe I’ll get into heaven, be worthy of the kingdom of God, and be blissed out or whatever.
The alternative — the notion that there’s nothing I need to do, no set of hypotheticals to prove, no need to put together arguments to try and justify my existence, the idea that I can simply be and that what is, is enough — has, at times, felt like a terrible idea.
Because for so long, proving my worth was all I really knew how to do.
I was bullied for my buck teeth and bifocal glasses. The braces I eventually got didn’t help. And to make matters worse, I was super precocious.
With so many deformities I overcompensated by using my advanced intellect to prove to myself that I was better than my schoolyard tormentors.
Solitary introversion became my saving grace. Being an outcast and belonging to no clique was fine by me. If someone sneered or whispered behind my back, I avoided them and made up whatever arguments I thought they were making about me in my head. And I demolished them.
All I really needed to get through school was this and to get as many A’s as I could on my report card. This way, I’d win the approval of all my teachers. I’d prove my worth in their eyes and that would be enough. Their approval would give me all the authority I needed to shield me from my inner angst and turmoil.
So that’s what I sought. I ran away from the risky, intimate, in-person back and forths of basic human connection and socially checked out; I memorized encyclopedic talking points and framed them as debate openers in my head, whispered them to myself over and over again as a mantra, imagined myself winning arguments on public stages and naturally, started over-identifying as an intellectual.
Such spells have a way of becoming their own thing, moving into the interior of your life, and taking over your whole persona.
Who would I be without this torture, without this constant need to prove my self-worth? Without all my highfalutin defensive mechanisms?
These questions have burned in me over the past six years and I wonder if others with restlessness have felt the same.
Is this the tick in my mother’s incessant need to take pictures of everything — or is that just a mom thing? Is my sister’s inability to sit in front of a tv screen without also scrolling on her phone at the same time also just a form of escapism? Is my friend’s terribly short memory — and I mean short, the man can’t remember anything you tell him after five minutes — just his way of disassociating?
And was this tick fueling my presence on Twitter?
Maybe I was very good at Twitter because I was very adept at the game of proving the superiority of my intellect.
Don’t get me wrong. When I was there, I produced top shelf content. I’m talking holistic, Ram Dass quality level shit.
I wrote sermons that could make you contemplate the Dao, poems that convinced you you had to honor Charlie Kirk’s humanity even if you disavowed his idiotic takes on politics and wisecracks at Ibram X Kendi in the name of loving him and all humanity. And I authentically meant it.
My tweets were the kind of sacred herb you could find only in Jamaica. None of this click-bait-divisiveness-for-its-own-sake shit.
But a picture of weed on the internet is not real marijuana and the simulation of speech with a human being is not the same as good ol’ fashion, live, back-and-forth conversation.
That word: conversation. It includes the word, “verse,” denoting music, tempo, rhythm, a beat, a sway, a riff. These are actions that require the real, live, coming together of humans with their full, embodied selves, not brains in vats operating with cold detachment.
Real conversation is risky because it requires avoiding escapism, and deeply listening to what the person in front of you is saying — not for the purposes of proving your self-worth but for its own sake.
None of this is achievable on Twitter because none of it is achievable without sound.
Unlike text on a screen, sound is disorderly and unpredictable like jazz. It can make you relax or increase your stress. It is an ephemeral paradox, a fleeting vibration that travels through the air, first emerging and then dissipating, at one point here and then gone, never to be heard or spoken of in quite the same way ever again.
And it is precisely that impermanence that lends it its weight.
Sound, if I am giving it the attention it so richly deserves, is a reminder of my own temporary, finite existence. It shatters the illusion of eternity, or of absolute “rightness,” and reveals it to be a sham I try to escape to whenever the fact of my mortal existence becomes unbearable.
To produce a sound that resonates and reverberates requires that I fall in love with the reality of my own impermanence. It requires being okay with anxiety, with boredom, and training yourself to recognizes its hidden lessons. And it requires an ethical practice of surrender to, as Prince put it, “something you’ll never comprehend.”
It’s only after I’ve accepted that my ignorance far outweighs what I know — and always will — that real, true dialogue with another can begin. This is where the real magic happens.
But it’s impossible for me to accept my ignorance if I constantly feel the need to prove my superior intellect. There are cross purposes here.
And Twitter is a perfect platform for exercises in intellectual masturbation.
Sometimes I found myself itching to find an influencer whose opinion I despised and who had a ton of followers I could siphon off; an influencer who conveyed just a liiiiittle too much aggression or resentment or bitterness for my taste — just like the ones in elementary school. An influencer whose expression of some of the more base human emotions could serve as fodder for my own clever quips on non-duality or dense tweets with big words that demonstrated I’d read the King James Bible.
This wasn’t always my motivation, but at some point I felt an addiction taking over, found it nearly impossible to look away from the dopamine hits fed to me by the hundred thousand followers I’d acquired.
That feeling was ecstasy.
But it was always short-lived. And I never felt satisfied.
I told myself I would only stay on for a certain amount of time, just one hour during the day but I’d get hooked and scroll for hours.
In the end, the platform felt like a digital slot machine masquerading as a town square, with the make-believe prizes of likes and retweets presented as a jackpot, and all of it designed to feed my neurotic obsession with demonstrating how smart I was and that my knowledge would be irreversible and never-ending.
But wanting something to be irreversible and never-ending is a kind of death wish.
Summer comes and goes just like the phases of the moon. All things come and all things pass away, only to return again in springtime. This transience, this evanescence, these are the terms and conditions for beauty.
And when I finally learned to surrender to this, I deleted my Twitter.
My soul is fed, not by obsessive compulsion but by things that take time. It is fed through active listening, presence with people I love, and an oral stimulation that requires the use of my mouth in a dialogical encounter with another;
one that breathes deeply,
loves for no reason at all,
and makes sound.
Nice, thank you. There is also another important reason to move from Twitter (besides what you explained), mostly unnoticed but fundamental. Twitter owns your contacts, not you. If you quit, you cannot take the audience with you. In Substack instead, you own your audience. I wrote a short piece to explain this: https://open.substack.com/pub/4two/p/how-to-own-your-audience