Twenty Twenty One Has Arrived

I don’t go in for that whole new year new me thing, that out with the old in with the new thing, but I won’t yell at you if you do. There are a lot of old things I love, so why would I throw them out? I try to better myself each day, mentally at the very least, so the newness of me is an ongoing process, one I am proud to be part of.

I understand why people take on this mantra or way of thought, a new calendar is a physical and visual example of “the new” and from that it can be easier to bring change or growth into a life. The cynical view though, looks at the statistics of how many resolutions fail, how many new me’s don’t actually make it into reality.

It doesn’t mean you can’t embrace the idea for as long as you want, and however you want.

Facebook For Lent? Goodbye.

So Lent begins on Ash Wednesday, which is February 18th this year, and I had to decide what I would give up for it. Last year I gave up Twitter with a friend of mine, she is giving up Twitter again this year and that got me started thinking about whether I would give something up as well.

At first I thought I might just go without giving something up, for most of my life I never really gave anything up so it is new to me to be doing this lately, but I did know that I got a lot out of it last year when I gave up Twitter. I reflected on that and knew that it would be nice to have another good experience like that, but what would I do?

Then last weekend came around, I got in my head a little more deeply than I would have liked and I realized there was one culprit and it was Facebook.

140 Characters Til Freedom

Twitter is one of those things that millions of us use, and we all use it differently.That’s the beauty of it and so many other forms of social media, we find our own place within it, and we make it home. Like any home, however, it isn’t always exactly what we want it to be, but all we can do is put in the work and effort to make it so.

See, that right there is where I could have grabbed a Captain Jean Luc Picard meme to visually show you that I was saying make it so, and that’s something easily done on a platform such as Twitter. In this hypothetical situation one of my followers might have thought that was a stupid thing to do, and was a waste of their time to read it, and that’s fair, but you know what? I don’t care.

The Triumphant (?) Return

Lent has come to a close, and that means I can return to Twitter, but have I learned anything while being gone?

What did I hope to learn?

Was it that I don’t HAVE to read every single tweet that comes across my timeline? Well, yeah, that was one thing I wanted to work on for sure, and I believe I have. I have popped back on a bit here and there since I logged back in Wednesday at midnight. I don’t have that feeling like I used to, that feeling that I absolutely must know it all. So I am going to embrace that, and keep that going from here on out. Do I really need to read everything? No.

When I logged back on, I was pleased to see that I hadn’t lost any followers and that I had some mentions to look at. It was nice to see that no one fled while I was away, and that a few people had sent tweets my way. I looked over that, and then I started unfollowing accounts. I know that I followed too many accounts, I was just bringing far too much information into my timeline and almost felt guilty if I didn’t read it all, so I trimmed about 600, but it took about three hours to do so, that kind of sucked. I might unfollow more accounts, but for now I think I have the right mix of people, sports, news, and entertainment; so I will keep it like this for now.

Part of me feels like I have to perform, that I have to do something entertaining for those that follow me, but I know that is going to be the quickest way to make my Tweets unbearable. When I think I have to do something like that, I really am not entertaining at all, so let’s avoid that, Matt.

Wow, this entry is kind of all over the place, but then again, that is where my mind is right now.

I have been on Twitter for a little over three years, and in that time I have probably at least checked it a few times a day, if not spent the majority of my free time on it. I have made friends, and I have had news broken right before my eyes, and that is addictive as hell.

I just went over forty days without looking at Twitter once, and that has made coming back to it seem all the more foreign.

I am happy that I don’t feel the need to read every tweet from some of my favorite people, because I don’t need to know all of it.

I am not missing out if I don’t see what they wrote at 9:15 a.m., nor will I disappear if someone doesn’t read what I wrote.

Hell, I will have even better stories if people don’t read all of my tweets, or maybe my stories will seem more polished.

I have returned to the realm of Twitter, and I don’t think I will return to my old ways in regards to it.

I like Twitter quite a bit, and I am not going anywhere, but I can deal with less of it.

Yes, this wasn’t my best entry I have ever written, but I had some things in my head, bouncing around in a way that I had to type them out, or I was just going to keep wondering what the hell they were doing up there.

If you have read all of this and are not completely confused, then thank you for doing so. If you have read it and you are confused, then welcome to my head, it gets a little kerfuffled up there sometimes.

I made a sacrifice for Lent, and I think I did the right thing.