Twitter

It was a hard day for me. The weight of the pandemic and the dysfunction of the holidays not being very holiday like hit me hard today. But when I shared my pain with my Twitter crew, things felt better. I am so grateful for the support I get from people around the world on that service. I know that some people find Twitter to be a cesspool, and if I look in the wrong corners I see it as well, but the group that I interact with in a daily basis is so life affirming and supportive. ...

A few weeks ago I changed my username on Twitter. It had been a long time coming. When I got sober and started interacting with people on Twitter I felt that I needed an anonymous handle and in the fog of the time I simply changed my handle from @ddeville to @soberboots to go along with the name of this blog. Shortly thereafter I felt that I needed to separate my other interests into a second handle and thus began the struggle of trying to maintain two handles on Twitter. Invariably, I neglected one of them. I spent time trying to get the followers that I’d had on @ddeville to migrate to my non sobriety handle, that didn’t work so well. I spent tome trying to only post certain things on one of the two handles and invariably ended up posting something about sobriety on the wrong handle. ...

On July 28th, I had one of those big blow out fights with a Facebook friend over politics. It got ugly. I got angry, really angry and ultimately removed that friend from my friends list. I also made an announcement that I’d be leaving Facebook for a while and that the best way to reach me would be by phone or Facebook Messenger – since like a lot of people there are “friends” on my list that I don’t actually have any contact information for and who don’t have my phone number. I stewed over this event throughout the weekend. The committee in my head told me all sorts of things about this person and all sorts of things about myself. I was stressed out and not handling myself well. I’d lost my serenity. And I was still posting on Facebook. A friend in my 12-step group noticed and mentioned that he’d noticed – in a kind and loving way. I don’t recall exactly when the conversation happened, but my wife suggested that perhaps, just maybe, I didn’t need to engage in Facebook. Or on Instagram, or on twitter, or read the New York Times daily. Her logic was that these things weren’t really adding value to my life. In fact they were stressing me out and I was not that great to be around. I committed to reducing my interactions with Facebook. ...