A little while ago I gave up Twitter for Lent. Back when I made this decision and for the few days succeeding Ash Wednesday, when it all began, I wasn’t sure I’d be able to do it, but I loved the idea of taking on a good challenge and seeing just how strong I could be over the next 40 days. The urges to log on were strong at first: maybe I could check my notifications but not tweet anything, that way I wasn’t totally breaking the rules. But I decided against it. In my greatest moment of weakness, when the little red notifications on my phone were staring me down, beckoning me to the dark side, I deleted the app. It was an act of impulse but I figured there was no way I was going to be motivated enough to re-download it now, so I was safe.
As time went on I combatted the other struggles of the Lenten season: remembering not to eat meat on Fridays and deciding what beautiful church I would attend on Easter Sunday. Strangely enough, I hardly ever thought about Twitter. Occasionally I would get an email from Twitter saying that someone had mentioned me in a tweet or retweeted something of mine, but honestly, I didn’t even have the desire to open the email and see what it was. Every so often something really funny or relatable would pop into my head and I would consider saving it my phone’s notes so that I could share it once I went back on, but I was too lazy to ever do that. I didn’t compensate for my lack of Twitter by going on Facebook or Instagram any more than I usually did. In those 40 days, it was just like Twitter had never even existed.
Twitter used to be my favorite form of social media. I first downloaded the app the summer between 9th and 10th grade and we have been pretty much inseparable since then. I loved the idea of such a wide and diverse variety of content being all in one place: news, sports, humor, relatable quotes, and more. I loved broadcasting my daily thoughts and anecdotes to friends and I eagerly anticipated the take-off of new meme trends. I thought for sure there was no way I was going to be able to live without it. But somehow I survived. I got my news from other sources. I made my jokes in person or over text. I got memes from Facebook and group chats.
The week leading up to Easter I remembered that Sunday signified the first time I could log onto the app in nearly a month and a half. I got a little excited, mostly because that meant I could start coming up with something creative to tweet announcing my return to the Twitter-sphere. (I ended up going with “Happy Easter bitches” followed by a gif of that girl from Pretty Little Liars saying “Surprise bitches, I bet you thought you’d seen the last of me”). Back in February I had imagined myself logging on as soon as I woke up on Easter and tweeting and scrolling uncontrollably, making up for lost time. But I hardly remembered at all. I ended up frantically tweeting my come-back tweet in the Uber on the way to church because I almost forgot.
It’s been a week now since Easter and since I re-downloaded Twitter and those little notifications that drove me crazy back at the beginning of Lent are actually kind of annoying now. I have no desire to tweet and even less of a desire to read others’ tweets. I had no intentions of quelching my Twitter usage by doing this. I thought that being away from it for a little bit would make me love it even more once we were reunited. But my long distance relationship with Twitter has ended much like my long distance relationship with a boy ended last year (not well). As sad as it may be, I think it may be time to delete the app for good.
