2/6/19 discussion of my plan for a "selfish year" in 2019

Here is the link to my February 6, 2019, Twitter thread discussion about my plans to make 2019 a "selfish year."

I actually forgot I wrote this thread. But it says a lot about what I was thinking and feeling at this time.

Again -- probably more than anything, what I'm trying to do is express the way I felt I was being hurt by a lot of the people who I had spent months, if not years, helping in real life. They were mean to me in real life and on Twitter. And I was just trying to find some way to get them to see that they were hurting me, so that they could stop hurting me and be nicer to me.

Obviously these folks didn't listen to me -- despite this and other attempts to get them to see how hurt I was. This is, again, why I took my following/follower count to zero later in 2019.

But another thing I was trying to express here, which, as you can see, I tried to express a number of times at the beginning of 2019, was that the writing I did on Twitter was labor. It was labor I was doing for free. It certainly was adding value to people's lives. And I couldn't do this labor for them anymore, and add value to their lives, not only because they weren't adding any value to my life, but because they were actually being mean to me and making my life worse.

As my later threads will show, one way I stopped doing this labor was simply by stopping my participation in politics. My participation in politics waned all through 2019, as I tried to find the ways to stop being involved so emotionally with people who hurt me and start being involved in channels of activism that could get results but wouldn't require as much emotional involvement.

My activism increased at the end of 2019, and at the beginning of 2020, I started finding ways to be much more active again. Unfortunately, then March of 2020 hit, and I basically stopped all of my political activity.