What Twitter has meant to me
I joined Twitter in September of 2019. A Gen-X holdout, it was my first foray into a social media platform.
(If this sounds crazy to you, it was because during the MySpace and Facebook years, I was mired in medical training and then with “balancing” a career and young family, and the idea of spending more time on a computer was not my idea of a productive way to spend my limited free time).
So, what changed in 2019?
I had finished writing a novel, and in all the research on what to do next, I kept coming across the advice that Twitter was a good space for writers, both for the #WritingCommunity and the networking opportunities.
I joined Twitter to enter a writing mentorship contest called Pitch Wars in 2019, and when my book manuscript was selected, one of the unanticipated benefits (and, I realize now, one of the most valuable things I gained from being a part of the Pitch Wars program), was that my Twitter community filled with other writers.
Later, in 2021, I would come across a call for an anthology for flash fiction speculative parenting stories. At the time, I had recently put away a little sci-fi story about the wish to clone oneself as a working mother (only something goes horribly wrong), because I didn’t know what to do with it, and thought it might be too weird. When I saw the anthology call, I dusted it off and submitted it. To my surprise, it was accepted for the anthology, becoming my first fiction publication, alongside authors I never would have connected with if it weren’t for Twitter.
So in very tangible ways, I would not be a published writer today without Twitter.
By now, you’re probably wondering where are the seven things I promised you, and they’re coming!
But there’s one more part of Twitter for me that I want to explain.
Spending time on Twitter as part of the #WritingCommunity, I soon came across #MedTwitter. Here, there were other physicians saying all the things out loud that we’re trained in medicine not to say.
On Twitter, I learned about gaslighting and mansplaining, and that, basically, I wasn’t crazy.
All these things that had happened to me had happened to others, and worse, were still happening. I made more connections in #MedTwitter than I ever did in my time in academic medicine.
And I learned from the courageous, younger generation, the Millennials, that there is power in speaking up. (Instead of the old, fallible Gen-X belief that if we women kept our noses to the grindstone and worked twice as hard without complaint, we would eventually be treated as equals in the workplace).
Here are the seven things I learned from Twitter that I will carry with me:
- Burnout is real
- Moral injury is real
- You are not alone
- Vulnerability is strength
- The world is bigger than you think
- The world is smaller than you think
- There are good people in this world
(I’m not going into the value of Twitter during the pandemic as it’s beyond the scope of this short article).
I haven’t closed my Twitter account yet, but I have locked it down (so that only my followers have access to my tweets). This article is a good explainer of why you should lock down but not delete your account.
I’m also spending much less time on Twitter, for all the reasons Jelani Cobb so eloquently writes about in today’s New Yorker.
I’m grieving the loss of my Twitter community from a personal standpoint, and, in addition, from a practical standpoint, as the platform I’d been counting on to market my book out in March 2023 (ironically, a near-future thriller about the potential danger of AI algorithms in healthcare).
Many writers depend on the platform for their business, and I understand why they’re reluctant to leave.
I have, in the meantime, joined Mastodon, as I wrote about last week. It has, to my delight, all of the seven things I learned on Twitter.
Yes, it is slower. Yes, there is no algorithm. But that’s not necessarily a bad thing.
Also published on Medium