For the sake of my mental, physical, spiritual, and chronometric health, I am departing the platform formerly known as Twitter. As friends and family know all too well, I am not one for social media. However, the hubs convinced me to join Twitter in April 2019 and I found a couple communities there that sustained me through some very hard times. Those communities are gone; only a few individuals remain. The platform now known as X reeks of musk, a smell I have always found nauseating. Admittedly, I am hypersensitive olfactory-wise. I have nothing to learn from X. But I did learn lots from my stint at Twitter.

◦ BM (Before-Musk), this was the house Black Twitter built.

◦ 140 characters demands pithiness. 280 — not so much.

◦ Piss off the right/wrong people and you’ll pay! BM, you’d know why.

◦ The terms “gatekeeping” and “centering” and “virtue signaling” …

◦ Not pursuing a career in academia was the right decision for me.

◦ Disability Twitter was da bomb, BM! A welcoming place for freaks like me!

◦ White women suck ass, collectively! And not in a good way.

◦ There is an art to the long and cogent yet entertaining thread. Very few have mastered it.

◦ Public shaming is an act of violence.

◦ The modern abolitionist movement is well thought out and constructed. And named. I am for liberty. I am an abolitionist!

◦ I am neurodivergent.

◦ There is no end to the list of problems with white women.

◦ Indigenous people can be seen and heard on the platform, unfiltered, but you do have to actively seek them.

◦ Damn! Yes, I do have a lot of internalized ableism!

◦ It is unwise to assume a fellow Tweeter is from one’s same hemisphere.

◦ Antisemitism is so normalized that this here neurodivergent Jew often didn’t recognize it.

◦ Doom-scrolling is a real compulsion. (Not an addiction.)

◦ Book-burning white nationalists will make strange bedfellows with Black antisemites, Asian transphobes — just about anyone on an individual basis.

◦ There are some honest-to-god atheists a-tweeting!

◦ If you give Twitter access to your photos, you give Twitter access to your photos.

◦ The space between tolerance and acceptance is a chasm.

◦ If it weren’t for cats, dogs, and other critters, our timelines/Twitter feeds might never be cleansed.

◦ I don’t really know what it means to have my timeline cleansed.

◦ Did I mention how much white women suck?

◦ I could say it was nice while it lasted, but nothing about Twitter was ever nice. Informative, misleading, funny, maddening, confusing, supportive, hilarious, irrational, revolutionary, international, hateful, joyful — yes! But ‘twas never nice!