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This blog is a work-in-progress "table of contents" with links to all of the threads I made on Twitter since I started using the platform in October of 2012. I've currently posted for all of my threads up through February of 2019.
Every once in a while I like to do a post reflecting on the time periods of the threads I've recently posted.
As I've mentioned a lot before, my professional life has been a roller-coaster ride. After having a nervous breakdown, I left New York City and came back to my home state of Colorado in 2012. From November of 2012 through November of 2015, I worked at a company that I ended up helping a lot as they prepared themselves to be sold for about $180 million.
I ended up helping the family who sold the company over the following years, as they started up a company that was an investment firm and sales consultancy hybrid. I myself worked as an independent consultant, but got most of my business from this one family.
I ended up having a lot of really bad experiences with all of the companies I did business with through this family. And in March of 2018, after being horrendously bullied by one client, I cut ties with the client, also hoping to cut ties with the family and simply find consultancy work with companies on my own.
Much of my spring and summer in 2018 was geared toward making this happen. And, while I found some business here and there, I never found anything really steady. By August of 2018, I was working with one client I'd found on my own. And in October of 2018, my investor friend, from the family I'd helped, set me up with another client.
By August of 2018, I had taken on $9,000 in debt, just to keep myself going. However, by October, the two clients I had really put me back on a good level financially, and I was back in a good place.
At the same time, I'd gone through so much struggle, and I'd been really depressed.
I'd shared my feelings about this with people around me, in real life and on social media. But the only reaction I ever got from people -- especially on social media -- was that what I was going through was not just no big deal but also even worthy of ridicule.
People in my social circles, even people I was helping to achieve statewide political aims here in Colorado, as well as national political aims elsewhere, treated me really poorly. The only time they treated me nice was when I was doing something for them. Otherwise, they acted either like they didn't know me or like I was garbage.
As 2018 finished and 2019 started, and I really started to reflect on whether I wanted to keep putting my energy and time and money toward people who were always going to be so mean to me, or simply just neglect me, I became less and less politically active. So, as 2019 progressed, I did less and less political activity. The drop-off is actually pretty dramatic.
I tried to explain to people -- via social media as well as in real life -- that I wasn't going to help folks if they just kept being mean to me. But the only thing that seemed to accomplish was people taking my "arrogant attitude" as yet another excuse to abuse, deride, or neglect me.
On top of this, I was dealing with a lot of abuse in my neighborhood. By this time, it had been almost a year straight that I was continually being stalked, into and out of my neighborhood, not only by folks in my neighborhood, but also by my landlady's husband, who spent all of his time -- and I mean twenty-four hours a day, seven days a week -- in a small carriage house on the property I rented, waiting for me to leave the house so he could either come out and harass me (sometimes accusing me of doing all kinds of crazy things in my house) or else stalk me.
In mid-January of 2019, I suddenly lost the one client I'd been able to secure for myself. This took me completely by surprise, and it set me in a really weird position. I had one client remaining, who was paying me just a little bit less than enough money for me to keep financially afloat. And, given the fact that my finances at that time were all debt and no savings, I felt the pain of being financially slightly-less-than-okay immediately.
It seriously took me no longer than two weeks for me to be so out of cash that I couldn't even buy food. I went to the 7-Eleven in Globeville (folks in Denver may know it) to buy $3 worth of food -- which I thought would be my last food for a while -- only to find, by surprise, that my credit card was already overextended.
I went without food that day and another day. The following day, while attending a community meeting in my neighborhood -- the first meeting in Globeville about the tiny home villages -- there was a table with all kinds of pastries and snacks. I hadn't expected it. But I ended up taking a full plate of pastries and snacks home with me. That was my food until my next paycheck came through -- which by that time was only a couple of days, anyway.
The fact that I had literally gone to this Globeville meeting with no food in my stomach, and that I shamefully took pastries home, simply so I could eat over the next couple days, only added to my sense of anger over all the people in Globeville -- many of them Hispanics like I -- making such an outcry against letting the tiny home village for homeless folks be set up in our neighborhood. It really cemented for me the fact that nobody cares about other people. And it made me want to just stop involving myself in any more political or social efforts.
But things got even worse. In mid-February, the CEO at the company I was consulting for tried to convince me to leave my position one month earlier than we'd agreed to. This would literally have killed me. And while I didn't tell her that, I did tell her it didn't make any sense for me to leave. She got angry at me for saying so, and yelled all kinds of things at me, stopping just short of saying, "Fine, then, baby! Have it your way!"
This person, by the way, in March of 2020, was hand-picked by the governor to lead the innovation team for Colorado's COVID response effort. You can see her making headlines in the Denver Post and being featured on Colorado Public Radio for the work she did.
I find this really funny.
I'd had conversations with Jared Polis (via Twitter DMs, to be fair) before he got elected as governor, specifically about the need to decriminalize sex work. And once Polis was elected, he totally ditched me and started acting like he didn't know me, even in person. And I had a CEO literally asking me to fire myself, then stopping just shy of calling me a spoiled baby when I said, No, I won't fire myself.
And then, in March of 2020, the governor who lied to me and then acted like I didn't exist hand-picked the CEO who tried to get me to off myself for one of the biggest COVID jobs in the state.
So... weird!!!
So I'd escaped being forced to fire myself one month early from the company I was consulting with. And I was looking for other clients. And I was consistently making just less than enough money to survive.
In March of 2020, I had another stretch of days where I simply hadn't had enough money for food. These days coincided with the Colorado Democratic Party's reorganizational meeting, which -- hilariously enough! -- was an all-day event with no food.
I walked there -- the meeting was in downtown Denver -- from my house in Globeville. And I sat there the whole day, having gone, I think, two days without food already, my stomach gnawing at me, and looking at a lot of these people -- including the governor -- who had gone from praising me while I was helping them during the elections to pretending like I didn't exist, even while they were standing right in front of me.
This was a really surreal situation. And it totally made me realize -- people don't care. People act like they care. But they don't care. And it just made me feel like, There is no way in hell I am going to help any of these people ever again.
This was one of the reasons I'd started coming to the decision, as well, in early 2019, that I was going to take my follower/following count down to zero on Twitter. I could see that people on social media were either ignoring me or neglecting me, or else -- far more common -- just flat out abusing me, mostly via subtweeting me while I was writing threads or immediately after I'd written threads.
It didn't make sense that all these people -- I mean, politicians, political organizations, people in local or national media, etc. -- were all following me and getting value from my real life efforts and from the stuff I was doing on social media, but the only thing they could do for me was abuse me. I didn't want them as followers, and I didn't want to follow them, if this was the only thing that was going to happen.
This, I should say, was really amplified for me when I started doing things like standing up for Desmond is Amazing.
Desmond is a kid living in New York who does drag. He has done all kinds of drag shows, and he's really talented. But anti-LGBTQ folks -- some of whom have quite vocally presented themselves as white supremacists -- started attacking Desmond for being a drag queen. First they attacked him. But then, when they got flak for bullying a kid, they started going after his parents, calling them pedophiles and sex traffickers, sending child protective services after them, etc.
I was mad. So I did whatever I could, whenever I could, to stand up for Desmond is Amazing. As a result, I started getting all kinds of Nazis -- I mean, they'd send me pictures of Hitler, etc. -- attacking me, calling me a pedophile, giving me death threats, and sending other people on social media to attack me.
It suddenly became clear to me that the biggest reaction I was getting from anybody on social media was the violent, hateful reactions from these fundamentalist white supremacists whenever I stood up for Desmond is Amazing.
It was so easy for all these hateful people to send hate my way. But it was nearly impossible for people I helped in real life, right here in Colorado, to send anything approaching love my way. And, in fact, they did whatever they could to subtweet their own special brand of hate my way, too.
All of this helped me decide that having followers on Twitter just wasn't worth it. And, over the following months, I started taking my following/follower count to zero.
So, as these threads progress, you'll see that my threads become a lot less involved in the outside world, and almost not involved in politics at all. You'll also see me talking more and more about taking my follower/following count down -- because I really wanted people to tell me not to do it if they really didn't want me to do it.
My threads become a lot less event-oriented an a lot more research-oriented. I like the research-oriented pieces, when they're good.
I also write a lot of opinion threads or editorial-style threads. I'm not as fond of those, honestly, and I wish I hadn't written so many of them. Nevertheless, I'm keeping them as a part of this "table of contents," because they show what I was going through and how I was feeling about the world.
Eventually, I should mention, my financial situation got better. By mid-May of 2019, I was back to having a full slate of clients. And by the first of June, my bank account stopped being consistently in overdraft mode -- a condition which, by the way, cost me $3,500 in overdraft fees, when all was said and done.
Through the summer I had a lot of clients. And I finished out 2019 and started 2020 with two clients that kept my pay level right where I needed it to be in order for me to survive without worrying.
So things turned out okay. But the experiences I had in early 2019 really shaped all of 2019 for me. And I was really so jaded by all of it that I didn't do very much social stuff at all throughout 2019 -- I just didn't want to see the faces of the people who I felt had betrayed me in Colorado.
That changed a little bit in early 2020, as I started to get more politically and socially active again. But then that all came to a screeching halt in March of 2020, when the pandemic hit and everybody went into lockdown.
So those are some insights into what my life was like at this time.
Thank you for visiting this blog. And I hope you enjoy the threads.
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