And Luckier…..
“All goes onward and outward, nothing collapses,
And to die is different from what anyone supposed, and luckier”
~ Walt Whitman, Leaves of Grass
I wrote these words with a sharpie and a ruler on a sheet of plain “typing paper” — that is how old I am — and taped it to the paneling on my bedroom wall when I was sixteen.
And I remember these words when I experience greater or lesser losses - when my favorite restaurant closes, or I turn in an old car, when I am struck down by a life changing diagnosis, when I bury a loved one, when I leave what seems like a whole life behind, shake the dust off my shoes, and keep walking.
It all goes onward. It all goes outward. Somethings do collapse but you and I won’t.
Twitter might.
It is hard to articulate what Twitter has meant to me over the past dozen or so years. I’ve fought and loved and wept and rejoiced there. I’ve found eternal friendships and buried a few of the friends I found there. I’ve met stalwart comrades, brave hearts, inquiring minds and folks who have helped me sharpen my sword.
I’ve largely learned to protect myself from the bird app’s abuses and abusers. I’ve wrestled there with problems that puzzle and distress me, and a good deal of the time I’ve come out on top of them. When they have pinned me to the mat, I’ve done my best to learn something from surrender and sportsmanship.
Every single tweet I’ve ever written has spelling error or a word omitted. I’ve thumb-talked and typo-ed my way through every horror, challenge and milestone. I’ve shared the pathways I’ve taken and the processes I’ve undergone to stay alive, keep my head sane and to maintain my broken heart’s ability to love.
I’ve fought for my life there.
When I was diagnosed with an impossibly bizarre cancer - thousands of people mailed me good luck charms, cards, and sent donations to keep me hopeful, loved, alive, fed, and housed.
In the pandemic, as a subsequently immunocompromised and necessarily isolated person I’ve been even more Twitter-reliant. It has —as the Unfortunate Mr. Musk said — been my “public square.” It is where I work, and where I have met friends after work.
There were many times I thought of leaving — when I was swarmed by thousands of bots calling me a race-traitor, when some dark-triad character on there decided to pwn me by having thousands of moving companies call my office land line (I never used it really, so I just unplugged it for a week and went on with my life). When I offered my cancer testimony to the senators who were fighting to preserve Obamacare and my words were read onto the senate floor by Cory Booker, many strangers told me on that app that if I couldn’t afford to pay two hundred thousands dollars a year for the chemo that was keeping me alive that I deserved to die. I received explicit death threats, and was called an “ugly vag” after my Trump dreams project gained some national notoriety and some right wing extremists became incensed.
But, by blocking, closing comments, reporting and stepping away for a few days I could self-regulate and let the shaken snow-globe settle and come back. Why? Because friends were there, and folks who identified with the challenges I was negotiating.
Twitter has given me a place to put my morning/mourning thoughts: whatever noise I wake with and the words I need to assign to the strange, peculiar, stressy, fucked up, beautiful, heartbreaking and hilarious things that happen to me.
And to make them into something useful for others.
I don’t know if it will remain a safe and manageable enough place to do this work in the same way there. But all goes onward.
Somethings collapse, but not really.
Everything changes.
And sometimes the death, or even the possibility of the death of something we have relied on, generates things that are different from what you or I or anyone supposed and luckier.
I’ll be still there, and and now I’ll be here as well - sharing my morning thoughts.
Follow me there, or here or where ever you like as you feel led.
