Twitter Saved My Life Tonight

Twitter is awful, I think you’ll agree.

Almost every criticism you’ll ever hear of Twitter is, to a greater or lesser degree, true.

It’s an echo chamber that serves to reinforce users’ existing views to the point where they become hostile to anyone expressing differing opinions.

It’s a debating sewer where nuance and ambiguity are near-impossible to convey and the benefit of the doubt can never be extended to any opponent, where all that matters is playing the hero to your followers by heaping the maximum amount of scorn on whoever you happen to be fencing with.

It’s an outrage farm that encourages explosive anger at the most trivial of misdeeds and fuels a self-righteousness arms race wherein tweeters compete to signal their virtue by proclaiming the most extreme offence taken at every utterance that can possibly be taken as offensive by any hypothetical individual, no matter how minor it might be, or how obscure it might remain without the outrage to publicise it.

It’s an ill-mannered schoolyard where cliques are quick to form and even quicker to dogpile on anyone they see as not aligning with their own worldview or failing to acknowledge their own matchless collective wit.

It’s awful. We all know it.

But last night I was on Twitter for hours, and something happened.

I want you to imagine a well. The kind of well that goes so deep that if you’re unfortunate enough to find yourself at the bottom, you won’t be able to see any light from above.

Down there, in every direction you see absolute blackness. There is no way out. There is nothing to light the dark or fight the growing cold. Down there your feet are sinking into thick mud and you can’t even move from the spot you stand on, can’t even try to feel your way to somewhere better, can’t even find the walls of the well, can’t even discover the dimensions of the subterranean cell you’ve found yourself in.

The only relief available is that if you get down on your hands and knees, you can feel a hole opening up beneath you, and you can escape the well by throwing yourself down, deeper and lower, and finally and utterly disappearing. It’s your only hope of spending your life anywhere but the bottom of this well. It’s sweet, sweet oblivion, and as much as you don’t want to drop into space, you can tell that soon, you’ll have no choice, because the walls you can’t see feel closer by the minute.

I want you to imagine all that, if you can.

But imagine there was one other course open to you. Imagine you could, down there in the darkness, send out a call. A feeble call, a pathetic call, a sad whimpering pitiful call. If you could send out that call, and somehow, in the impenetrable nothing surrounding you on all sides, it reached someone.

Imagine if in the darkness there were people who heard the call, and sent their own calls back, telling you that you were loved, and you were important, and they wanted you to stay around. Imagine if they answered your call to beg you to hold on through the night and promise that even in the dark, they were there.

Imagine if because you found yourself able to send out that call, and because others heard the call, and replied, you clenched your fists and squeezed your eyes shut and gritted your teeth and somehow you stayed away from the hole for a few hours more, and when you opened your eyes again, you looked up and you could see that the well wasn’t as deep as you thought, and somewhere high above there was sunlight glinting down on you, and if you weren’t out of the well, you could at least see enough to give you hope that you would be someday. And you knew that when the night came down once again, it wouldn’t be a night that lasted forever.

Imagine that you held on till a light appeared, because you heard the voices of friends.

Twitter is awful. I know it is.

But last night, Twitter saved my life.

Thank you, everyone who heard my call.