That Abusive X

You loved them once.

They were new, exciting, opening whole horizons to things you’d never seen. People, places, all the heady rushes of the new relationship. It was small, at first, and it felt both safe and exciting. The things you did together! The friendships that sprung up all over the world! And the potential!

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You had good times, saw things, did things. There were no differences of opinion, not then. You could talk about fun stuff, creative and happy stuff, just 140 characters at a time. You could see your friends freely, chat about anything and everything, and no-one told you what to think.

But stuff sneaks up on you, y’know?

Your X makes decisions over your head, like they’re nothing to do with you. They feel like pebbles, slowly piling up on your chest. You don’t even notice them ‘til they start to weigh you down, and then you wonder why it’s so hard to stand. Things change. Your X becomes more distant. They don’t let you talk to your friends any more. They try to control what you see, when you see it, how you think, your political and social beliefs. They start to needle you about your money – no, I’ll tell you what you do with that.

But even then, don’t you still love them?

Don’t you have a history together? Don’t you try to get out ahead of it, and keep them and yourself happy? You can see the rumblings, the red flags, but you don’t want to think that they matter. You want to think it’ll be okay, that things will get better. You try to understand how they work, and for a while, it’s good again. You can comprehend how they manoeuvre information, and you can operate within it. No, you say, look! I can still see my friends, they’re all still here. And we can still talk about whatever we want!

But things slide further, much as you try to hang on.

Your X gets worse. Your friends fall away. You’re not allowed to see them, and you don’t even know where they’ve gone. You can’t voice an opinion without your X’s endless cronies jumping on you, all scorn and aggression, and telling you you’re wrong. Everyone tells what to do. You whole world fills with your X, manipulating everything, telling you how you must look, what you must think, what you can buy. How you must vote. And you know it’s false, and you try to speak out, yet more and more and more people are falling for your X’s bullshit, believing everything they say.

Celebrating it, even.

By this point, you’re feeling utterly lost. You’re clinging to the log that’s the last of your friends and supporters, your little creative circle and the people you love, but you’re all caught in the same millrace. The log is keeping you afloat, but it’s also the thing that’s dragging you, because you don’t want to be parted from it. You know you have to let it go, swim for the bank, because it will be better there, safe and still, and you can start again. But how do you leave it? How do you leave that X, when it’s been there with you for so long?

You know that that X is hurting you, you know you’re drowning in it all. But can you do it? All that history?

Can you let go, and swim for the bank?

I joined Twitter in the March of 2007, one of the very earliest of the Brit Tweet-Up crowd. In seventeen and a half years, I’ve used it both personally and professionally, and watched it rise, crest, fall, crash, and finally break. I haven’t deleted my account, simply because @danacea has become so much a part of who I am that I don’t want anyone else nicking my moniker, but it’s over. I am absolutely DONE with the dead blue bird.

M*sk, in many ways, has done us all a favour.

Find me (and lots of other lovely peoples) on Bluesky.

(Please note: this is tongue-in-cheek. I’ve no desire to mock anyone’s difficult relationships or separations, far from it. It’s a metaphor, that’s all).

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