How I beat overwhelm: I loved Twitter – but Musk and menopause made me quit
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The social media site was great at first. I met my best friend there and it made my professional dreams come true. But the secondhand stress was ultimately too much. Before it made me lose my mind, I loved X. Some of my happiest times were spent there: I forged lasting bonds, laughed lots and launched a new career.
![[Emma Beddington]](https://i.guim.co.uk/img/uploads/2020/03/20/Emma_Beddington,_R.png?width=75&dpr=1&s=none&crop=none)
In 2009, when I joined what was then known as Twitter, I was bored, working a corporate job, blogging on the side, desperate to be a writer. Twitter made that happen: I posted my writing, gradually people started reading it and eventually some of them asked me to write for them, for money. Without hyperbole, it made my professional dreams come true.
It was also huge fun. I met my best friend on Twitter, when she was pretending to be two office-working dinosaurs called Steve and Dave. That was the vibe back then: silliness, gossip and parody accounts, daft crazes and chat. It was the water cooler that my very serious workplace didn’t have.
The combination of those elements made Twitter addictive and, for well over a decade, I opened it on waking and only stopped scrolling when I went to sleep. I reasoned it was a work necessity: the place where I could post my writing and connect with professional contacts; a way of tapping into ideas and interesting happenings. But I would have been there even if it wasn’t.
Not because it was an unalloyed pleasure. Reading about so many brilliant careers gave me galloping professional insecurity and frequent Fomo (or rather, the stage beyond Fomo, when you know you are missing out because everyone is talking about something you weren’t invited to). Twitter became angrier, louder and more fractious, especially after 2016, when Brexit and Donald Trump ruined things. I skirted online aggro, but increasingly felt I was overhearing hundreds of fights a week, each one provoking a jolt of secondhand stress. It wasn’t fun any more, but I was hooked, chasing that early high, despite dramatically diminishing returns.
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