Twitter Breaks and Naps

About a month ago, I stopped using Twitter. I wasn’t having a very good month, and being on the site just made me feel worse. I love Twitter for the most part, because I follow some really great people who make me laugh and think. But my timeline was a constant reminder of everything wrong in the world: mass killings, racism, murdering cops, trolls, and other terrible stuff. It made it hard to focus on the good things, and I’d often leave the site feeling angry and frustrated more often than not.

Adjusting my follow list was Sisyphean battle because the negative stuff would still show up in my feed. So I logged out one day when I was feeling particularly aggravated, and I haven’t been back since. If you’ve left me messages and I haven’t responded, I’m sorry. I’m in the process of getting myself worked out and hope to be back into the swing of things in a few weeks. Maybe. I don’t know. We’ll see.

Anyway, people talk about the huge productivity boost they get when they stop using social media. That didn’t happen for me. My productivity level stayed the same because, instead of being on Twitter, I took naps. Lots and lots of naps. I was tired all the time, and I didn’t want to be awake. I only wanted to exist in my dreams. Sure they were bizarre most of the time (once I dreamed I was married to an alien), but dreams are oddly comforting. They aren’t real so there are no consequences, and many times I woke up with some great story ideas.

Slowly, though, I’m coming out of that phase. I’m still tired, but not as much and I still take naps, but not as many. I’m getting genuinely interested in things again. Like I used to feel such anxiety and dread whenever I thought about writing…well…anything: fiction, freelance work, gaming, whatever. Now, I’m starting to have moments where I’m like, “Wow, I really WANT to write that”.

Quitting Twitter wasn’t the only change I made. I started taking a multivitamin, cut back on the amount of junk food I was eating, and began rereading one of my favorite philosophical books. So I don’t want to make it seem like it was all Twitter’s fault I was feeling so shitty and now I’m A1Okay now that I’ve quit it. I’ve suffered from mental illness since I was a teen, and I have other bad habits that don’t help. But addressing just a couple of those things that were doing more harm than good has me feeling better than I did a month ago, and that’s worth hi-fiving about.

I did do some work on #TowOM, but I took a break from it to play Aveyond 4* (which is fun AF and highly recommended). I’ll talk about what’s happening with #TowOM in a separate post, but I really just wanted to say I’m alive and still fighting the good fight. So, talk to me in the comments. How do you deal with the craziness on social media?

[*Yes, that is an affiliate link. If you want to support my game development, consider using this link if you decide to purchase the game.]