A couple weeks ago I decided to take a break from Twitter, and it has honestly been one of the best decisions I've made this year. I made my first Twitter account when I was a freshman in high school. I didn't know exactly how twitter worked, but I knew all of the cool people used it and that it was fun, and back then all I wanted to do was be cool and fit in. Thought I was strong enough to not fall into temptation, but I was sadly mistaken.
At first, I would check twitter once or twice a day since I didn't have a smartphone at the time. I was also determined to not let Twitter become my life like I knew it did for some people. The content I tweeted, liked, and retweeted were your basic relatable girl and high school tweets; nothing serious. However , it was not long until I fell into the Twitter world trap. After I got my smartphone, I would scroll through my Twitter feed during class none stop. It didn't take me long to gain a good amount of followers with my sudden spurt of activity, and I quickly decided that I needed to grow my account as big as I could. So, what was originally intended to just be a fun little thing, became a toxic waste of time.
Being on Twitter all the time, and seeing and associating myself with negative content had a very bad and prominent effect of me. Whatever hardship I was dealing with at the time was reflected in the content I was putting out and sharing. This bad habit continued for about five years, and during the summer between my senior year of high school and freshman year of college I decided to start over. I deleted my old account and made a new one. Once again, I restarted with the intention of creating a none toxic feed. For a while I was successful, but was soon followed by some users from my old account. The situation didn't become as toxic as the last, but I stills didn't like what I saw.
I decided to do some house keeping, and unfollowed those I saw as toxic. This time however the change stuck. I have been able to keep my feed to something that greatly reflects a human who loves funny sarcastic tweets, traveling, and music. However, I still had some anxiety about falling into the negativity and popularity. Plus as school started I didn't have time to waste an hour or two on Twitter like I had in the past. I was weary of the idea of not using Twitter, but I knew better and without a second thought deleted the app from my phone. Ever since that day, I have felt a sense of freedom. And truthfully I haven't really missed it like I thought I would. Now don't get me wrong Twitter can be a wonderful place to share and connect with others on different topics, but for me that wasn't the case. Now, I check Twitter once a week for about 5 minutes, and am completely satisfied with myself. Sometimes you just need to step back, get some perspective, and make the choice to make the right decision for yourself.
