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This blog is basically a work-in-progress "table of contents" for the threads I've posted to Twitter since October of 2012.
I actually started working on this blog on April 30, 2018. So I'm just about to reach three years of working on it. I've progressed in fits and starts, as you can see -- linking just shy of six years' worth of Twitter threads (I just finished June of 2018) over the course of three years is, to put it nicely, a leisurely pace.
Every once in a while, I like to do a blog post reviewing the time periods I'm revisiting as a part of this project.
As I mentioned, I just finished linking all my Twitter threads from June of 2018, which are in the posts below.
You might notice, as you read the posts above (or... they will be above...), I didn't do any Twitter threads throughout all of July of 2018. In fact, I didn't post anything at all throughout July of 2018. I took a total break from Twitter. There are a number of reasons for this.
In March of 2018, I left a big consultant gig I'd been working on. My day job is as a business consultant. I usually help businesses that are just starting their actual operations in earnest. I got the company I'd been working for to a good place. And the management of the team sort of took the opportunity to shove me into the corner, put me under the thumb of a really abusive guy, and basically let him hector me out of the company. It was easier than firing me. They could just put a total halt on my work and have a person they hired (they said so) because he was abusive abuse me out of a gig.
I was sort of used to this pattern of action, as the company I was working with at the time was a company invested in by a so-called friend of mine I'd been working with since November of 2012. As soon as I got any of his companies to a good place, he'd pull the rug out from under me, leave me without a gig or a livelihood, and walk away with the proceeds from yet another round of funding. That's a little bit of hyperbole, but not much.
So I'd decided in March of 2018 that I was going to try, in earnest, to get consultant gigs outside the sphere of my so-called friend's investment portfolio companies. I had been working a lot throughout the months, trying to find some gigs. By the time July hit, I realized that if I didn't stop everything I was doing and just totally focus on getting new gigs, I was not going to find anything.
I was somewhat right, as the work I did in July of 2018 essentially led to the gigs I started getting starting in August of 2018 -- though I should also mention that I was basically forced to take another gig through my investor friend starting in October of 2018, as well, to get myself to a point where I was making ends meet again.
So this was a really stressful time for me from a professional point of view: dealing not only with severe stress flowing over from the gig I'd lost, but dealing with the pretty high stress levels associated with hustling to find new gigs, essentially in completely uncharted territory for me.
Additionally, I was experiencing a lot of stress in my social life. As you can see below, I had been working hard to attend as many events as I could in the Denver metro area as the 2018 Democratic primaries approached. I was part of the Denver and Colorado Democrats' Central Committees at the time. But I'd actually done the work more I did in 2018 more out of interest -- I was really seeing a side of politics I'd never seen before, and up close. I wanted to capture everything about it that I could.
It should be noted that at this time, I had about 1,000 followers on Twitter. Among my followers were folks involved in Colorado politics. Many were elected officials. Many were members of the Colorado media. And many were either interest groups and rights groups, or else people in management positions in those groups, in Colorado.
In early 2019, I deleted my entire follower/following list. So if you look at my list now, it may be hard to understand what I'm talking about here.
But, while there were a lot of good reactions to my increased level of involvement in Colorado Democratic Party activities, there were also some adverse reactions. In particular, a lot of people in interest groups stopped looking at me as one of their volunteers and started looking at me as if to ask, "Who's this guy?" Some of these people had known me for three years. But it suddenly became like they hadn't known me at all.
A similar thing happened with members of the media. The more I attended events, and the more I spoke about them on Twitter, the more I found members of the media in Denver suddenly subtweeting me. Some of these people -- the people you see writing in the papers -- I know personally. And they used to talk to me in real life, go places with me in real life, and like my tweets. But now it was like they didn't know me at all. And then they started subtweeting me in really weird ways.
Following the 2018 Denver PrideFest, I ended up having some bad physical issues. Those issues spilled over into the post-primary rally for the Colorado Democrats, which you can read my review of below. It was topped off by my attending that rally and really only being welcomed by one person. I knew a lot of people there. I had spoken in the past with a lot of people there. I had emailed back and forth with a lot of people there. But when I went to that rally, not only were people acting like they didn't know me, but some people were downright antagonistic, doing things like shoving their empty drinks and plates and dirty napkins onto my table, elbowing me out of the way, staring at me with the evil eye, etc.
It was really disconcerting -- especially since I felt under a similar attack at a gig I'd just help to put into a really good position businesswise. And it made me question how involved I really wanted to be in Colorado politics.
You'll see in the posts above (as I post them...) that I came to a sort of compromise throughout the rest of 2018. I figured that if the interest groups I'd done so much volunteering for were going to act like I was a terrible person when I did things outside of their volunteer events, and if the only way I was really going to be effective was by sticking to their volunteer events, then I'd simply do their volunteer work and not think about anything else. I ended up pushing through the 2018 elections (and beyond, by the way) by only doing volunteer work, mostly phone banking, for the interest groups.
Another thing I've discussed a lot throughout my 2018 posts is the fact that I'd ended up being stalked a lot in my neighborhood.
My experience of being stalked goes back a long time. I've been a transvestite since I was eleven years old. But in New York City in 2000, when I was twenty-three, I finally started going out in public as a transvestite. It was at that time that my landlady in Brooklyn, unaware of what I was doing (I'd usually go to other places to change -- including, strangely enough, the Metropolitan Museum of Art!), told me people were stalking me out of and back into the neighborhood. She asked me not to do anything illegal, if that's why they were following me, and, regardless, to watch my back at all times.
I left NYC for a few years to work and live in the Southwest. And while living in Santa Fe in 2003, I ended up being stalked again. It's a long story.
I wasn't really stalked heavily, though, until 2006. This was the point in my life where I settled down and got a steady job. And I was stalked at work (again -- long story) and, again, into and out of my neighborhood. This stalking persisted throughout my time in New York. However, it continued when I came back home to Denver in January of 2012.
Some situations were really bad and really scary. For instance, I had to leave one place in 2015, because the person I lived in a multiplex next to was so violent, but also because he was literally going door-to-door, throughout my neighborhood, telling each household what a bad person I was and why I should get kicked out of the neighborhood. This guy claimed to be a "member of the neighborhood watch." I found out what was going on from my landlord, who also lived in the multiplex, and who had been receiving visits from people in the neighborhood, asking why this person was going around, warning people about what a bad person I was.
So by 2017, I was used to being stalked. The place I moved into in 2017 was the first single-family unit house I'd ever lived in. So, as opposed to the people who lived sharing a wall, ceiling, or floor with me stalking me and making my life miserable with noise, people ended up hanging around outside my place. Some would park their cars in front of my place and then sit in the cars, sometimes all night.
A lot of trouble accompanied these activities. And by early 2018, the people doing this had attracted enough bad attention onto themselves that they were evicted from their places. However, in May of 2018, the situation changed. My landlady had a small structure on the property my house was on. And my landlady's husband started staying at that property all the time. Eventually he really was there twenty-four hours a day, seven days a week.
He didn't just sit inside the structure, watching me go into and leave the house (while other folks in my neighborhood would suddenly pop up at odd blocks and follow me into and out of the neighborhood). He also followed me out into the yard, saying all kinds of weird things to me, accusing me of doing all kinds of weird things -- and also harassing me a tiny bit physically, by doing things like rubbing my chest whenever I was in arms reach of him (I always had to back away and back away) or making fellatio gestures at me, always on the weirdest pretexts.
He also did things like stand outside my windows, on a side of my house where he thought nobody could see him, and just look into my windows, which were frosted glass, I should mention, so they weren't see-through, and I had no drapes. I had no curtain rods, either. But I could see my landlady's husband peering through the window at times. And when I'd go to the window to see what was going on, he'd move away. This must have freaked out my next door neighbors as well, as they ended up putting floodlights and a camera out by the side of their house, where the guy had been prowling around.
This is basically a long way of saying that, by July, I was so depressed and so weighed down by the stalking that I literally could not go outside of my house. I felt like I'd been browbeaten into house arrest. I never stopped feeling that way, to be honest, which is why I finally ended up leaving that house in April of 2020.
So one big reason I didn't post any threads to Twitter in July of 2020 was because I didn't leave my house. I was afraid to leave my house. And I just felt so depressed at feeling so unwanted in basically every aspect of my professional and social life that I simply could not handle even participating on Twitter, where I felt like everybody was simply angling to hurt me the same way I was getting hurt out in physical life.
By the time I came back to Twitter in August of 2018, I had changed a lot of my ways of experiencing the world, which meant the content I'd post to Twitter would also change. But this was really only the beginning of a process for me, as I'm still adjusting how I act on Twitter, even almost three years later.
I hope you all enjoy these threads. Thank you very much for reading.
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