Stuck

I had a good Memorial Day weekend. I went to a friend's wedding on Saturday (I'm not really the sentimental sort, but it's hard to argue against an open bar and a free meal), I wrote a VEB post on Sunday in which I took great pride and which I feel ranks with some of my best work on the site. And on Monday, I had a nice afternoon/dinner with my family.

On Tuesday, I woke up and felt miserable. Instantly, inconsolably miserable.

I didn't feel sick. I didn't have any logical reason to feel bad, and I had a decent day at work, but I felt awful. It happens every so often.

My work day, while not bad, was very busy, so I hadn't tweeted throughout the day just as a matter of circumstance. By the time I got home, I just didn't feel like it. So for the next five days, I didn't.

I still posted tweets to publicize my blog posts, because I feel like I owed my VEB cohorts some demonstrated effort to raise awareness for the website as a whole. But that was it. I would still check Twitter, though not nearly as often as I normally would, because it is a necessary tool for me to stay informed about my myriad interests, but I wanted to take a break from the interpersonal communication aspects of Twitter. It was by far the longest I went between posting tweets on my own since I joined the website in March 2011.

A few people noticed my habits had changed, and I told them I was fine. I'm still not sure if I was lying to them.

Those who know me well know that I have struggled with moments of sheer melancholia, pretty much forever. I have never been diagnosed with depression, though I am quite certain if I saw a psychiatrist, I would be diagnosed with it or something related. It never gets that bad, in the sense that I've always been able to compartmentalize it (it didn't affect my work, at my day job or blogging, and had I chosen to tweet, I'm quite certain I could've faked my way the last few days) and I've never contemplated violence, against others nor myself. But I still have those moments. And when I'm asked if I'm okay, I always say I am, because this is what people want to hear.

The reason I took a break from Twitter is because I felt like a fraud on it. My Twitter persona has always been an exaggerated version of my personality in real life: in real life, I am often sarcastic and quick-witted, though in a much more subdued way than I am online. I'm not as shy as I once was, though it still takes me a while to feel comfortable with new people. To be clear, I don't consider this to be a personality defect--I'm far from alone in this regard. But it's in such stark contrast with my much more extroverted e-persona.

The truth is that Twitter has been, for over half a decade, my comfort zone. Through some of my most insecure moments--when I felt like a failure, when I felt very alone--Twitter was where I could feel secure to say whatever I wanted. Much has been written, usually in reference to awful people who use Twitter for racist/sexist/homophobic/etc. sentiments, about how people hide behind avatars (I do not actually resemble Homer Simpson nor do I own a "TV SPORTS" pennant, though I would like one). But it works for me because I think I'm a fundamentally good person. I'm empathetic and caring and even when I don't do a good job conveying it, it is central enough to who I am that an uninhibited version of myself is, even if annoying, tolerable on a human level.

The phrase "quarter-life crisis" has become associated with those who fear the unknown. Think The Graduate (I took this analogy from the Wikipedia page on the phrase): Benjamin Braddock faces uncertainty about how his life will turn out following his graduation from college. I'm six years older than Braddock and probably won't live to 108, so I'm more inclined to view this as something of a third-life crisis. And it's the opposite of the quarter-life crisis: it is not fear of confronting the unknown, but rather the fear of routine. The fear that I'll be stuck in my current life pattern--not that I have a bad life, but rather the feeling that things could improve.

Twitter became a routine. It became boring. I got tired of regurgitating the same tired cliches over and over. I got tired of using it as a substitute for actual interpersonal communication. I'm not going to jump right back into tweeting exactly as I did before, because what I was doing before wasn't fulfilling for me. But I will be back, and hopefully, in every sense of the word, better than I was before.