Monopoly is tough, emotionally.
I spent a year off Twitter, more or less. These are the tell-tale hearts.
Last year I took a break from Twitter. I don’t believe cutting out that digital food group altered my brain. Procrastination still festers in vital life limbs. In the end, it will be revealed Instagram was the true villain of the piece.
However, not having to vomit an opinion as emotive news headlines tumbled was good for me. And probably you. I have enjoyed the odd lurk though. Someone compared cyclists to minorities the other day. That was great fun.
The dopamine/likes deficit was tough on my ego, I will admit to that. But it was also glorious to let a thought die. Some people like to smash plates. Apathy in certain quarters is fabulous. Women get told to chase and coddle in self-care. But self-preservation is cheaper and sharpens your senses.
There is a temptation to turn short stories into novels. I mean that literally and metaphorically. Not writing a Twitter thread in 2018 seems almost rebellious.
The platform I use to release my newsletter has an efficient drafts function, they amass like arts centre flyers. Confusing to decode months after. Bullet points meant to web into cheap and soon to be dated profundity.
Here are some thoughts from drafts and scraps that don’t need anymore flesh.
Monopoly is tough, emotionally. (One New Year’s Eve, Dan and I attended a house party and someone pulled out the board and my brain muttered ‘this is a personal attack on us’ quite a bit.)
The age at which funerals aren’t unusual creeps up on you.
Would highly recommend reading only the letters Agony Aunts get for a few months, and never the replies. A great boost.
Banning Baby, It’s Cold Outside is a Matarese Circle-level plot to derail the #MeToo movement. The lady on Russian public transport pouring Dettol on men’s crotches was socialising.
Telling a man around the 30 year age that ‘if she’s got the HPV vaccine she’s too young for you’ is a great test of male temper potential. And male self-belief.
Social media killed the female columnist.
Stop telling me, via a screen, that you are nothing without your boyfriend and implying he is your ambition’s Rosetta Stone. He occasionally boils water and adds milk and a tea bag. (When the Irish actress Harriet Smithson died in Paris, Liszt wrote to her estranged and guilt-ridden husband, the composer Berlioz: “She inspired you, you loved her, you sung of her, her task was complete.” I think about that quote a lot.)
Life hack: telling a recruitment department you’re estranged from your family means no one asks for your degree scroll twice.
Spy life advice: lying to a recruiter about familial estrangement means you have to always be on the ball in the run up to bank holiday weekends.
This year everyone should have been let run for President of Ireland.
Most box dyes could be renamed ‘bold teen in a shopping centre carpark on a Saturday auburn’.
There is going to be a divisive opinion article in the coming months about privilege and the word coming from mouths that look like mine. I am so glad I am no longer regularly tweeting.