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This blog is a table of contents for my Twitter threads, starting in 2012, and working through toward the present. I include links to the threads, as well as quick descriptions of the threads.
From time to time, I like to do a blog post reflecting on the time frame of the threads I've most recently posted to this blog.
As folks might notice, there is a big jump -- about three months -- between the threads preceding this post and the ones following it.
The big reason for this is, in mid-2016, I shifted over to Instagram. From June through September of 2016, I almost solely posted to Instagram. I posted almost no new threads to Twitter.
I considered whether I should include my Instagram posts in this blog. I finally decided not to. Instagram is a lot easier to go through. You aren't sifting backwards through tweets and retweets, etc. You can see the posts quickly and at a glance via Instagram's tiles. So if folks are interested in seeing my posts from that time, visit my Instagram timeline at preemiemaboroshi.
There were a few reasons I switched to Instagram. Most of them had to do with my involvement with Denver's art community.
I was doing more and more visits to art galleries in Denver and throughout Colorado. And it was easier to tag the artists whose work I saw via Instagram than via Twitter. So I did a lot of my gallery reviews via Instagram instead. Then I just transitioned to doing everything via Instagram.
I also had been really influenced to join Instagram by some folks I'd helped out in early 2016. Their influence probably wasn't totally positive, to be honest. As silly as it sounds, I felt like they didn't think I was cool because I wasn't on Instagram as much (???!!!). So I did more stuff on Instagram because I thought that would make them think I was cool. LOL.
But I also felt somewhat confident in the audience I'd gathered on Twitter. I'd gotten about 1,000 followers. But I knew that that many followers on Twitter (in the 2015 & early 2016 time frame) usually was the same as having 10x that many followers on Instagram. So I sort of got greedy. I tried to get more exposure on Instagram because I thought I could have 10,000 followers there instead of 1,000 followers on Twitter.
I was also experiencing a lot of emotional difficulties, as weird as that sounds, with the Denver art gallery I'd been volunteering with. From April of 2015 to maybe January of 2016, I really felt like an instrumental part of their team. But then, as more folks became involved with the gallery, it was like those new folks (who were established already in other area's of Denver's art scene) started pushing me out, and my gallery friends, not willing to make waves -- it seemed and seems to me, though I may be wrong -- just let folks pushed me out.
Since the Denver art gallery folks put so much stock in Instagram and not as much in Twitter, I foolishly thought that if I could just get as big on Instagram as I was on Twitter, I'd be able to convince them I was worth protecting from these people who tried to push me out.
None of this stuff ever worked out. And, to be quite honest, it really backfired. My getting on Instagram was probably the worst thing I could have done. I was already on the radar of people in the Denver art scene who didn't like me. And being on Instagram put me on their radar even more. They engaged people against me -- in my personal opinion, though I could be wrong -- and basically spent from mid-2016 to mid-2017 shutting me completely out of that world. Instagram, probably more than anything else, enabled the people who didn't like me to end my life in the Denver art scene.
The emotional turmoil of this experience was probably heightened for me by the fact that, in late June of 2016, I lost my job. From 2012 through 2015, I'd been working hard for a company, helping them get sold for a lot of money. I received really nothing in return from that company once the management changed, other than animosity from a lot of people in the company. And I was fired in December of 2015. I got another job two days later. But that job slowly crashed and burned, and I was left without a job again by the end of June of 2016.
However, I had sort of seen the writing on the wall with that company. And by March of 2016, I had started some side work as a consultant. So when I was let go from the one company in June of 2016, I decided to see whether I could build up a book of business as a consultant.
I ended up spending the second half of 2016 working short-term projects as a consultant for a number of different companies. It was hard and frustrating work. But by the end of 2016, I had a somewhat stable book of business.
But during the second half of 2016, I think that I was really questioning a lot about my life. And every time folks in Denver's art community pushed me away, I felt like that was a reflection on the same aspect of myself that people in Denver's business community disliked, that was causing them to push me away. So, really, I might have been amplifying a lot of my self-doubt and projecting it onto my experiences into Denver's art community.
Despite this, though, I really hate to say that nobody in Denver really cared what I was going through. Nobody ever asked if I was okay. Nobody ever tried to help me. People just kind of didn't treat me very nice at all. So even if I was only imagining all the bad treatment, nobody ever really cared enough to ask me whether I was okay.
I'm also kind of sad that I didn't do Twitter threads during this time period, though. Since I had time freed up, I was able to do a lot of stuff. And I did a lot of stuff!
I took a couple trips to San Francisco. I took a couple trips to Marfa, Texas, where I watched an art gallery, for one-weeks stints each time. I did a lot of political work -- probably three or four days per week of canvassing, voter registration, or phone banking work, when I was really in the rhythm. I helped a literature festival, basically working as a board member and helping to manage all the volunteer activities, in what was only the festival's second year. And I did help a Denver art gallery make a huge transition, moving from one space to another, and do a highly publicized (partly thanks to me) grand re-opening with a show that probably should be remembered as one of the best art gallery shows in Denver in the 2010s.
Unfortunately, though -- all of that stuff is captured on my Instagram and not on my Twitter. But, again, you can visit my Instagram to see it, at preemiemaboroshi.
By September, I decided to go back to doing threads on Twitter. And that's where the posts above pick up.
My reasons for doing Twitter instead of Instagram -- other than trying to avoid the people on Instagram who disliked me -- were simple. Twitter allows you to do bite-sized tweets. So people can pick and choose what they like within a thread. And Twitter is much more of a multimedia experience. Since each tweet is separate, each tweet can be a separate type of media experience. Also, I never got more than a couple hundred followers on Instagram. And, while I had been at about 1,000 followers on Twitter, I was starting to lose followers, since I was never on Twitter. So I decided to get more active on Twitter again, so I wouldn't lose followers, and so I would hopefully gain followers.
Anyway -- this is probably one of the longest "what happened to me during this time frame" posts. But a lot happened during this three-month period.
As always, thank you for reading my blog.
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