Learning Hard Twitter Lessons

Learning Hard Twitter Lessons

At the beginning of my Twitter experience, I chatted a few times via messages with a few tweeters. Although this was fine at the beginning, at some point, however, I needed to stop. I needed to establish and maintain boundaries.

Even though not everyone who messaged me was a problem, there were a few situations where messaging became so painstakingly out of control, that for a short time, I dreaded logging onto Twitter. I literally had to pull back and lock down my DMs with a message stating that I did not want to be sent DMs.

The messaging aspect of Twitter was something I didn’t expect to be a problem. I know people are not always genuinely nice, but when I go to social media, I’m not looking for a fight or a need to defend myself from anything. Yet, defending and protecting myself was a major issue all because of my choice to respond to anyone’s messages in my DMs.

One person went as far as to monitor my Twitter behavior. That was both alarming and creepy and not something I expected from someone claiming to be a survivor of narcissistic abuse. Anytime that I was on Twitter, this particular person was sure to inbox me with long messages that seemingly had no end.

In the beginning, I saw minor red flags with this person in my threads, but I figured this person was just immature and dealing with heartbreak. So, when their messages began, I accepted that the person simply needed a consoling person to bounce off things regarding circumstances they were dealing with during that time. In the beginning, I didn’t mind.

Yet, I hadn’t settled for getting online each time to find this person bombarding my inbox with several long messages at a time. Soon, I found myself overwhelmed by nothing but this person’s messages, and it was no longer me just having pleasant conversation with another tweeter. It was more or less a tweeter taking advantage of my kindness and my time.

If I skipped out because I was busy living life offline, then the person would message me subliminal cues of disgust. They even had the nerve to tell me that by going online posting topics without bothering to check my messages made me a narcissist. I was dumbfounded. This person had no idea that I scheduled tweets in advance to keep my content going even when I was not online.

When I tried to explain my tweeting habits to this person, they basically gaslighted and dismissed me. They claimed that I was making excuses to evade accountability of wronging them. They gave me a long dissertation on how it was imperative for me to always respond to them. They behaved in such an entitled way of my time that I found myself becoming embittered against them. I felt entrapped by their attempts to control and manipulate me.

Eventually, I grew tired of logging onto Twitter to find my inbox inundated with this person’s messages to read. Their messages seemed to become longer and longer with copied and pasted material from their discussions with others, links they wanted me to read from other sites, and memes of information on narcissistic abuse that I was already posting about.

At the time, I wish I had the heart to just cut them off, but I felt caught up in some kind of trap to be nice. This person didn’t seem to have any couth regarding my own personal life and the fact that I may not always have time to be online. I later realized that this person used a lot of my posts against me. Things like my battles with insomnia seemingly meant that I should be online to cater to them. They literally monitored my every move.

I also found that this person’s rants about the drama within their life filtered over into Twitter drama of which I knew nothing about and didn’t want to be involved in either. This person posted long chats and photo-pasted their back-and-forth comments to others that seemed like a war of words. My inbox was filled with their messages. I couldn’t even read it all but intuitively knew this was their expectation of me. Yet, I scanned and/or ignored a lot of things they inboxed me because I didn’t have that kind of time.

This person’s rants against others became more evident as they talked about the Twitter wars they were involved in with other tweeters. I looked up the other tweeters this person was arguing back and forth with in an effort to determine whether this person was as much a victim as they wanted me to believe them to be. Once I saw their evidence, I easily discerned that this person was not a victim. Instead, they were a perpetrator, troll, and bully to others.

This person spewed a lot of venom towards other tweeters but showed an entirely different persona when they posted on my platform. Despite my seeing what I regarded as this person’s minor red flags on my platform, major red flags were frantically waving on the platform of others and within my inbox. I soon realized I had been duped into corresponding with a narcissistic imposter who claimed to be an intuitive empath.

Although I tried discouraging this person from working their life out through such crazy drama online, I realized how much drama their messages were bringing into my own life. I was on the path of peaceful living – peace I hadn’t experienced in years. The drama this person was involved in all over Twitter was not the experience I wanted for myself. So I decided to change my status regarding DM’s. I no longer desired to use messaging as a form of communication with anyone.

Yet, once I presented my newfound boundaries regarding my DMs to this particular tweeter, they became enraged, called me all kinds of horrible names, which included “narcissist”, and flooded my inbox with more out-of-control rants. Even though I expected they might be angry about my newly established boundaries against responding to DMs, I didn’t expect them to go on a rampage against me. I was taken aback by their brutal behavior and felt as if I had been kicked in the gut. I was stunned into disbelief and even a little hurt.

All I could think was that this person was far from the compassionate empath they’d claimed and presented to me (even though I had red flags about their behaviors from the start). I questioned whether this person had ever stopped to consider if I had problems, if I had a bad day, or if I had the space within my heart to commit to their daily rants.

This person eventually turned their rants against me in my inbox even though they portrayed silence and innocence on my platform. I decided to cut my losses and suggested to them to seek therapy – a service I don’t provide. Then I took a screenshot of all their messages to me, reported them to the proper Twitter “authorities” and blocked them.

At some point prior to blocking this person, they made it clear to me that the more I responded to them, the more messages they’d send me. They’d only continue to take ground away from me that I didn’t have the space to give them. That was a lesson I had to learn a few times with some others before it kicked in that any correspondence via messaging wasn’t for me.

I didn’t have the best luck with messaging at all. Most tweeters who took to my inbox simply weren’t reasonable, sensible, or respectful of me or my time. So, I let correspondence via messaging go altogether. After the experience with that particular tweeter who monitored and monopolized a lot of my time with ridiculously long messages they expected me to read, I was turned off to messaging altogether.

Sometimes, I’d respond to messages from people just to make sure that the person messaging me wasn’t suicidal based on how I interpreted their post, but I’d establish an immediate limit with no further conversations. It sounds sad to say, I know, but I wanted to care less about people in this way because it was costing me my own peace of mind. It was clear that there were far too many people looking for a better advantage over another tweeter, and my online persona even made me an easy target.

Yet, there were some tweeters who were genuine in their messages and I could tell they were truly looking for help. Some even alerted me to potential trouble coming my way on my platform based on their own interactions with certain tweeters who exhibited toxic behavior. Admittedly, I was very grateful for those alerts. However, the more followers I gained the more it became harder for me to determine if I could handle the influx of messages I received from tweeters. I could not handle it at all. So I stopped using my DM’s altogether.

During my last round with messaging, a follower alerted me of something that made absolutely no sense. It was a very broken message that gave the illusion that I had spoken to the follower before, but I had not. I later discovered that the follower was attempting to scam me onto their side as a part of their smear campaign against someone else who also followed me.

This follower’s actions ultimately became the last straw for me to want to remain on Twitter. I was already teetering on walking away from the platform because of other stresses. Instead of my posts being used for education, this follower, along with a few others, were actually using my posts meant for education and support to bolster their fabrications and smears against others. Causing anyone harm is never my objective even when I’ve spoken of my own personal struggles with narcissistic types.

Twitter eventually became an even harder place for me to want to continue to navigate with such struggles with other people’s craziness, and I just didn’t have the mental, physical, or emotional capacity to want to deal with such drama. I ended up blocking these types of people as well as the people connected with them. There was no way to tell who was innocent or guilty, who was victim or predator, or who was honest or dishonest.

I grew tired of having to deal with the toxicity, and even though there were so many tweeters and followers who were good to me, the mean and disrespectful behavior of those who seemed to be really intent on disturbing my peace became more than I wanted to deal with anymore. I am just not in a place in my life where I am willing to put up with nonsense. Nor am I willing to allow myself to be the poster person to be preyed upon because I might be considered kind and giving.

I’m actually exhausted from any type of narcissistic drama. I took a reprieve from it when I dropped out of the workforce three years ago. I somewhat retired into hiding, and I’ve been enjoying a quieter life free of drama ever since. So I no longer want to continue explaining myself to people when I don’t owe anyone explanations for anything, and I don’t feel like being a part of anyone else’s drama.

To allow myself to become engulfed in toxic drama online when I can abstain from it is not smart on my part. So, I decided to retreat from it all so that I could continue to recover and heal. Plus, there was so much tragedy and grief occurring within my personal life that I intuitively sensed it was time for me to take a different direction. It just so happened that Twitter went into it’s own strange lockdown of sorts, and I found myself not being able to read or post anything for hours at a time until I was eventually unable to post or read anything on my page at all.

Needless to say, I truly wish there were much safer online communities for people like myself. For a time, Twitter was that for me. Although this is not the case now, in hindsight, I now totally understand and empathize with what some tweeters meant when they spoke of their desires to leave the Twitter platform as well. Some tweeters were bullied relentlessly, and it’s a shame. As one person told me very early on in my Twitter adventures of posting content, “You have a lot to learn.”

… and I certainly learned a lot of hard lessons.