Turning Down the Noise

(The illustration is a two ink design I was gunna screenprint a few months ago, but stuff kept getting in the way so it only exists as a Photoshop file for now. I'm real excited about playing with overlapping inks to create additional color shades!)


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I love Twitter.

That is where I joke with my friends and readers, where I have real, meaningful conversations with them. It’s where I follow the work and witticisms of my peers and heroes, where I've built real friendships. And hey, how great is it when your tweet gets a bunch of attention? Or, even better, when someone you especially value favs or retweets something you posted? It’s my digital dopamine kick.

I hate Twitter.

The complex, beautiful people that I care about come off like assholes. Or worse: boring. It’s where the people whose opinions I respect rant about how badly our city, our society, our country, our world is broken and to not be outraged about it all is how the bad guys win. Do I look uncaring if I don’t issue a statement every time something horrible happens? Is it ever ok to make dick jokes when it might be sandwiched between tweets of mourning and righteous indignation?

What will get me most the most favs? The most retweets? Underneath every 140 character message I’m writing please notice me. Please pay attention to me. Please validate me.

When I first started posting my art and comics online as a wee baby teenager, I was starving for acknowledgement. Comments weren’t just validation for the time and energy I’d spent creating something, it was validation for existing at all. By producing material that engaged people —strangers!— I felt my existence was justified, and to continue that justification I had to continue producing.

I’m 32 now.

I’m doing work that is important to me, I have friends who care about me, I’ve made a family who loves me, I’m in a partnership that fills my heart up fully. I need to stop depending on strangers to validate my efforts, to validate me.

“Jesus, Erika,” I assume you’re saying to yourself, because it’s what I’m saying to myself as I read this over. “Melodramatic much? There’s no gun to your head, if social media makes you so miserable just stop using it.”

But when performing online is how you pay your mortgage and buy your cat’s food, it gets a lot harder to just vanish. Due to the nature of this bizarre job I’ve crafted for myself, I have to continue tweeting and tumbling and instagramming and facebooking and dancing on the internet. But I’ve gotta turn down the noise and my dependency on the outside validation, I’ve gotta set some healthier boundaries.

So I’m quitting Twitter.

Sort of.

I’m quitting the way I currently use it.

Maybe this will change eventually, but for now I’m going to stop reading my timeline and my replies. I’ll keep posting, because I gotta pay the mortgage and for the cat’s food, but I’ve gotta stop engaging. If there’s something important that really needs a response, Matt’ll let me know.

This is already how I handle my other social media accounts: just putting out content and not following how people interact with it. But unlike those other places, I really did enjoy chatting on Twitter, so this time it does hurt to turn it off.

This has been a long time coming. The internet is so loud, it takes up too much space in my brain, it gets in the way of my productivity.

I’ve gotta turn down the noise.