On stages of grief, or, an attempt at an exorcism of Twitter’s ghost

I promise I’ll stop blogging about Twitter soon. But it was such a huge part of my life for so long that its demise¹With hindsight, I think in the end we’ll consider its true demise to have happened years ago. makes it a ghost I need to perform an exorcism on. A reverse ghost, I suppose — my spirit is haunted by a place.

It’s been… about a month.²I consider my canonical final post to have happened on 19 August 2023, though when I realised I wasn’t going back, I did post to both say so and link to this blog, and then replied to a friend. My exposure to Twitter since then has been fairly limited; it continues to exist in culture, so sometimes I click on a link to a tweet, and once or twice I’ve typed something into search to figure something out about a current event. I close the tab quickly. In and out.³I also have hard limits set up. I’m allowed 15 minutes on my phone, and 10 on my laptop. I rarely break a minute. This felt bad for a little while, because it sucks, as we’ve established, that it’s still there, but it doesn’t any more.⁴Part of this feeling is a vague sense that I may have been the life of whatever party was still there for me to participate in.

That is, as I understand it, how grief goes.

I’ve had, all things considered, at 32, a fairly charmed life, at least in terms of the amount of grief experienced. And obviously, though I refer to the website’s demise and its ghost, none of this is actually like a death. But grief is about loss, not, necessarily, death. It is, I think,⁵Darkwing Duck voice: “Let’s get poetical.” about the irrevocable closing of a door, the turning of a door into a wall. It used to be there, and you could go there. And now you can’t. And this, again, sucks.

Elisabeth Kübler-Ross in 1969⁶Kubler-Ross, E. (1969). On death and dying. so famously proposed a model of how grief, broadly speaking, goes that here in the Year of Luigi 2023, where you can fairly reasonably dismiss it as outdated pseudoscience rooted in evidence that is anecdotal at best,⁷Modern research is mixed on whether people actually experience grief in five clear stages, and if they do, whether they cleanly move from the first to the fifth; one study will find that they kinda do, another will find that they kinda don’t. Personally, I reckon, and a reckoning is where I should note that I’m not an inch any kind of scientist, that the prominent cultural place of this model may have, by now, influenced how people who have been constantly exposed to it in the culture for all their lives describe or even actually experience their grief. I say, waving at the camera. we still won’t shut the fuck up about it.⁸Obviously it was me who first brought it up in this context. And I do get why, it’s not an uncompelling narrative model for how this messy thing about messy lives works. But lives are messy. Not everyone will react according to a fixed script.⁹Darkwing Duck voice: “Let’s get autistic.” But I’m a storyteller,¹⁰I usually say “cartoonist,” but really, the big thread running through all of my interests is an interest in storytelling and how to do it. so maybe a narrative model is what I need.

Let’s go through these in order.

Denial (201? – 2023)

Oh, I’ve definitely done denial. Heck, I think I might have been in this one the longest — the feeling that Twitter is probably evil has been there for long enough that I can’t even quite pinpoint where it starts. As B was quick to point out — no, it was not always full of Nazis. But there’s a point where it was the site we became friends on and a point where it was the thing it is now¹¹I don’t even think of the recent takeover as “now.”, and something¹²A lot of things. happened in the middle there that made it not just happen but irreversible.

I stuck around, obviously, for friendship. But did I always defend it that way? I mean, this is Denial, right. The road from “there’s nothing to defend” to “some people feel the need to defend” to “quite a lot of people are confused why you’re still on there” was paved with quite a lot of just not thinking about it. For all that was going on, for a long time, the thought of quitting Twitter only ever really crossed my mind when other people were doing it. In hindsight, yes, I was ignoring issues that would today send me packing from any other site, and should’ve sent me packing from this one years ago.

I knew the rot was in the walls for years before I ever admitted I was coughing.

Anger (2023)¹³These look like movie titles. The Stages of Grief Pentalogy.

I’m not a particularly angry person. I was annoyed with Twitter a lot, a lot of things over the last few years made me unhappy with Twitter.¹⁴See “Depression.” But the anger really only hit once I realised I’d actually quit.¹⁵Like so many other people, I threatened to “move to Canada” if this or that happened and I never followed through. In the end what did it was the demise of TweetDeck. And that was anger that this Place that had been so important to me for so long was being taken from me, that it was still there and I could still go, but never in the same way again. That’s what I was¹⁶Am. It’s cooled off, but it’s still there and will be for a while. angry about, not anything a billionaire did, not that the place had for years been riddled with rot. I was angry that it was over and that it didn’t feel like my choice.

Bargaining (202? – 2023)

At some point denial did turn into defending it. I can’t quite pinpoint this one either, but the most recent flavour of bargaining was stubborn defiance, this idea that I was gonna be the one to turn out the lights, that I was gonna be the last cockroach in the irradiated wasteland that was Twitter. I don’t know how I was imagining that going,¹⁷Thinking about it now I’m picturing MMOs being turned off, everyone getting together one last time until the servers go down. But who would’ve even still wanted to be there? Yeesh, what was I thinking. but in the end it lost to, well, it’s not called Twitter any more, is it.¹⁸My understanding is it’s now called “U+1D54F 𝕏 MATHEMATICAL DOUBLE-STRUCK CAPITAL X.” Catchy. Can’t wait to send a U+1D54F 𝕏 MATHEMATICAL DOUBLE-STRUCK CAPITAL Xeet. The wasteland went away before the cockroach got a chance to go home.

Depression (2023)

Look, Twitter, just, what Twitter was like, has made me depressed¹⁹Not depression-depressed, just sad-depressed. before. Like, during Gamergate.²⁰While writing I automatically put an asterisk in there, for once we dared not speak its name. In which a famous actor offhandedly called me a pejorative term, and I spent the next two years trying to have reasonable conversations with people who thought my reasonable conversations were games they could win by calling me slurs, or by sending me pictures of corpses or all the large guns they’d like to use on me.²¹I assure you this is an accurate summary of the whole affair for everyone involved. I would not call this my not-depressed-at-all phase — I was looking for a win that I knew in my heart would never come. That’s not a happy mindset to be in.

After that it’s, well, gesture vaguely at everything that’s happened in the past decade yourself, you can figure it out. A lot of this overlaps with the other phases — left unable to do anything about everything that I found frustrating or depressing about Twitter, it got punted into denial, and occasionally came out as annoyed anger. But it really came to a head when Twitter got bought.²²We need not say his name. The purchase turned it from a place where I could tune out the bad, just pretend it wasn’t there while I talked about movies or Doctor Who, into a 24/7 discussion zone for the bad.

Every electric car or rocket that exploded, every server pulled out of the wall, every stupid dog logo, every giant glowing cross on the roof, every stupid thing he said — became the topic du jour. Even amongst friends, even amongst an increasingly deliberately curated feed.²³I’m sure between rounds of despair I occasionally participated myself. Who would I have had left if I’d unfollowed everyone who was talking about his every move? Two bots? No, wait, he killed those, too.²⁴RIP in posting Millennialbot.

Acceptance

Twitter was important to me. It left a permanent mark on my soul. It got to do that because I made friends there, yes, and the depth of the mark is because of the weight of that friendship, it’s there because of my friends. I will forever be grateful that it got to make that mark, because I would be worse off in every way without it. Without you. Without y’all.

I wrote my way through this to try to, well, perform the exorcism. I hope I’ve done it. But these stages of grief? They overlapped a lot, and none of it happened in the right order. It’s nonsense. It’s a narrative device, and it barely works. Maybe I should’ve done the Monomyth instead. But acceptance?

I’m getting there.²⁵Darkwing Duck voice: “Let’s get there.”

• 1
  With hindsight, I think in the end we’ll consider its true demise to have happened years ago.
• 2
  I consider my canonical final post to have happened on 19 August 2023, though when I realised I wasn’t going back, I did post to both say so and link to this blog, and then replied to a friend.
• 3
  I also have hard limits set up. I’m allowed 15 minutes on my phone, and 10 on my laptop. I rarely break a minute.
• 4
  Part of this feeling is a vague sense that I may have been the life of whatever party was still there for me to participate in.
• 5
  Darkwing Duck voice: “Let’s get poetical.”
• 6
  Kubler-Ross, E. (1969). On death and dying.
• 7
  Modern research is mixed on whether people actually experience grief in five clear stages, and if they do, whether they cleanly move from the first to the fifth; one study will find that they kinda do, another will find that they kinda don’t. Personally, I reckon, and a reckoning is where I should note that I’m not an inch any kind of scientist, that the prominent cultural place of this model may have, by now, influenced how people who have been constantly exposed to it in the culture for all their lives describe or even actually experience their grief. I say, waving at the camera.
• 8
  Obviously it was me who first brought it up in this context.
• 9
  Darkwing Duck voice: “Let’s get autistic.”
• 10
  I usually say “cartoonist,” but really, the big thread running through all of my interests is an interest in storytelling and how to do it.
• 11
  I don’t even think of the recent takeover as “now.”
• 12
  A lot of things.
• 13
  These look like movie titles. The Stages of Grief Pentalogy.
• 14
  See “Depression.”
• 15
  Like so many other people, I threatened to “move to Canada” if this or that happened and I never followed through. In the end what did it was the demise of TweetDeck.
• 16
  Am. It’s cooled off, but it’s still there and will be for a while.
• 17
  Thinking about it now I’m picturing MMOs being turned off, everyone getting together one last time until the servers go down. But who would’ve even still wanted to be there? Yeesh, what was I thinking.
• 18
  My understanding is it’s now called “U+1D54F 𝕏 MATHEMATICAL DOUBLE-STRUCK CAPITAL X.” Catchy. Can’t wait to send a U+1D54F 𝕏 MATHEMATICAL DOUBLE-STRUCK CAPITAL Xeet.
• 19
  Not depression-depressed, just sad-depressed.
• 20
  While writing I automatically put an asterisk in there, for once we dared not speak its name.
• 21
  I assure you this is an accurate summary of the whole affair for everyone involved.
• 22
  We need not say his name.
• 23
  I’m sure between rounds of despair I occasionally participated myself.
• 24
  RIP in posting Millennialbot.
• 25
  Darkwing Duck voice: “Let’s get there.”