Every tweet is deleted, DMs in the process of, switches turned to off, one by one: every success and failure and hope and disappointment and opportunity and clusterfuck and useless ephemeralilty from 14 years of my life, from 27 through 41.

Were those 14 worth it? Not really, no.

While I've made some wonderful connections with now-lifelong friends and creative collaborators and had a few good opportunities, it wasn't worth what I let it do with my brain: I got sucked into its promise - which was very real - when I was at my most vulnerable, having lost my job, then my house – and I bought into the fantasy that it could give me a road forward.

The only road it gave me was a roundabout back into the feeding trough, dangling the hope that maybe I could be mentioned in the same breath as those writers with the 200k followers (a need for validation for which I’ve nothing but shame), that maybe I could have some impact on the world, that my hopes and creations were more than poker chips for a rigged game.

In the slot machine of Twitter, at least, they weren’t.

Anyhow, I'm not letting myself repeat those mistakes in this new social era (if I make the same mistakes at 41 as I did at 27, I won't be angry, just disappointed): I've happily moved on to Mastodon and here and the newsletter, doing whatever I feel like doing creatively and sharing it with whoever finds their way to it because at this point, honestly, fuck it.

“Fuck it”: was a more apposite summation of Twitter ever written? Probably. But fuck it: I'm free. And so are you.