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This blog is a work-in-progress "table of contents," posting links to all the threads I have written on Twitter since starting to use the social media platform in October of 2012. I have currently posted links to all my threads through October of 2019.
Every once in a while, I like to do a post talking about how my life was going during the time frame of the threads I've recently been posting links to here.
As I've mentioned before, my professional life had been a roller-coaster ride for years. 2019 started extremely bad, but then got progressively better. I'm a business consultant. And from April of 2019 forward, I basically added at least one client per month to my roster, through, I believe, July of 2019.
I made a decent amount of money from having such a full slate of clients. But there was some stress. Some of the clients just did not have good business operations. Other clients didn't let me do my job. And so I faced a lot of frustration with not being able to succeed with those clients.
I was also frustrated because I was continuing to get the majority of my business through my friend who I'd helped in 2015 to sell his company, and who now would bring me on board to help him with the process of building up new companies he was investing in.
With one of the clients we worked with in particular in 2019, I struggled a lot. In 2017 and 2018, I'd helped them a lot, only to be bullied and abused out of the company when the company felt I'd served my purpose. Nevertheless, in 2017 and 2018, the company had been a huge success for me. And, as I tried to drum up my own clients, not just get clients for my friend, I'd use the company as a reference and success story.
In 2019, when I came back to the company, everything was a mess. But the CEO wouldn't let me change anything back to the way it was. I told both her and my friend, who was investing in and helping the company, that if I couldn't get the process back on track, I couldn't drive success. They both said that was fine. I spent the next few months stressing out, every day, about being held back from driving success for the company. And eventually, the CEO ended the project.
I personally feel the reason for me coming back on board at all was to make my leave my relationship with the company on bad footing, so if I ever tried to use the company as a success story again, the company could say that they only thing they remembered was my failure in 2019.
I felt like I was at a dead end with my professional life. I felt like I'd tried and tried, since 2005, to find a way to succeed, even modestly. But it seemed to me like every time I drove success or found success, people would just find ways to remove me from that success or make the success blow up in my face. It was like people were dead set against me ever being able to take decent care of myself. I was really desperate.
As 2019 finished, most of my clients ended their projects with me. I kept one client I had found on my own and another client my friend had found for me. Those two clients were enough to keep me at an even keel financially.
In terms of my life at home -- I've mentioned before that through 2018, I had been experiencing a lot of trouble in my neighborhood. I was stalked into and out of my neighborhood. My landlady's husband was a part of the stalking, and he would stay on the property I rented, almost every hour of the day, to catch me coming out of my house so he could harass me.
It got so bad that I was eventually afraid to step outside my house. In 2019, this included even going out into my backyard. Eventually, in July of 2019, when my landlady's husband didn't see me for a while, he started harassing me by texting me.
I asked my landlady to make the texting stop. My landlady said that renters really can't ever expect to have peace at their house, and that if I really want peace, I should try to buy my own place.
She also said that she had a smaller house that had just become vacant (I know that person was also being harassed by my landlady's husband, by the way). It was half the size of the house I was in. But I would need to pay the same rent for it. But, by being at that house, I could avoid being harassed as much by her husband.
I told my landlady I wasn't interested in moving to a smaller space and paying the same amount of rent just to stop being harassed by her husband. I told her that I would just go ahead and not worry about the harassment from the husband for the next few months and then move out of the house in April of 2020, which would make it an even three years of my being at the house.
The arrangement worked out for both me and my landlady. And my landlady's husband stopped texting me.
I personally thought, given how many clients I had in July of 2019, that by April of 2020 I'd be in a really good position to think about buying a house. I had seriously never been making as much money as I was then making per month in my entire life. And so I started making a plan for looking into buying a house.
But then, like clockwork, my clients started dropping off, month by month.
I was, like I said, left with two clients who kept me on an even keel going into 2020. But, even by August of 2019, it was clear that the plans I had made for buying a house would have to be altered. By September of 2019, it was clear that I was going to face some pain if I bought a house. And by October of 2019, I was simply not thinking of buying a house anymore.
So I was so stalked and targeted in my neighborhood that I was afraid to leave my house. Then I was so targeted, even within my house, that I was starting to consider moving. Then I thought I could buy a house, given my current financial situation, only to watch that possibility crumble, month by month.
If my threads often sound bleak, or trapped, or desperate, that's because they were. And this is why.
In terms of my social life, through 2018 I had done a lot of political work. As 2019 began, I became a lot less interested in doing political work. Nevertheless, I still attended some events with the Colorado Democrats and Denver Democrats, simply because I had some obligations, as part of the party's central committee. I even had those obligations added to when I was elected to have a seat on the outreach committee -- though, as I've previously explained ad nauseam, I was basically boxed out of actually being able to take that seat.
But I did somewhat consistently attend political events. And I was trying to figure out new ways for 2020 to do political work that wouldn't involve me being so deeply involved with the inner working of the Democratic Party, which were leaving me rather cold and cynical.
Through the spring and summer of 2019, I was also engaged in taking down my count of followers and people I was following on Twitter. By August of 2019, I had taken my follower count all the way down to zero. That was a really good choice.
However, one thing I've noticed is that, throughout 2019, I wrote a lot of "opinion piece" threads on Twitter. I really don't like those threads. And I really feel I wrote too many of them. I've kept them in my "table of contents." But I think they show that I was really letting myself get triggered, just about every day, by something I was seeing on social media.
I should mention that, even though I took my follower/following count down to zero on Twitter, I would still constantly look at people's profiles on Twitter. I was especially interested in looking at the profiles of sex work decriminalization activists, since I felt that, thanks to laws like FOSTA-SESTA, it was of the utmost importance to decriminalize sex work.
But I would so often find my own feelings about sexuality at such odds, not just with those of sex work activists, but also with other folks I respected, that I would get triggered, almost every single day, and feel the need to write some new thread, either of opinions or ideas, to try and get folks (how? I literally took my follower count to zero) to see how my ideas could, and, historically, should, mesh with their ideas.
So these opinion pieces, even though I generally don't say so in the threads, are reactions to things I'd been reading on Twitter.
The problem was, I had Twitter on my phone. And, whenever I'd get fidgety outside of work hours, I'd just pull out my phone, open Twitter, and visit the profiles I liked. And I'd get triggered. Really, it was having Twitter on my phone, I later came to discover, that got me so triggered all the time that I'd have to write these "opinion pieces" almost every single day.
As time went on, I set limits for myself about when I could actually look at Twitter at all. Then, in mid-2020, I actually took the Twitter app off my phone altogether. That, like getting rid of my followers an the profiles I was following, was a really good choice.
The only other thing I'd like to mention here is that in November of 2019 I bought a car. It was a used car. But it was the first car I'd had since 2016. In 2013 I'd bought a really old used car, which broke down -- not because of the car's age, but because of my own stupid handling of the car -- in December of 2016.
Since that time, I would sometimes use Lyft to get around to places. But, more than anything, I would use Car2Go, which had cars parked all around Denver and some other places in the Denver metro area, that you could then use for a few minutes, a few hours, or even two or three days.
Car2Go was a great service. But it was discontinued in Denver at the end of October of 2019. So, a week after Car2Go was discontinued, I bought a car.
The car didn't do much to change my mobility. I was seriously being stalked and harassed so much in my neighborhood that I only left my house when I felt like it was an absolute necessity. Nevertheless, it was a big moment in my life, as I felt like I was back to some level of normalcy, having a car again.
So those were some of the things going on in my life at this time.
Thank you for reading. Please enjoy.
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