I got suspended from Twitter and it hurts which is good

So like ~10 days ago I got suspended from Twitter. They probably thought I was a bot — I was working from various libraries and cafes in Toronto, and using a VPN sometimes, so there was a 3-day period where they made me do a bunch of those Akrose Puzzles to prove my humanity, and then one day I just got this:

(I’ve submitted around a dozen appeals, without even a single automated “we’ve received your appeal!” email - it’s looking bleak. Maybe Elon fired this team…)

Luckily, this actually felt like a nudge from the universe to continue down a path I’d already been moving towards — slowing down and actually being with my own experience in a deep way, probably for the first time since the silent meditation retreat I did last year.

It feels like, post “Deep Okayness”, I had a ~4 month grace period of “holy shit, I can just stop efforting? I’m ok? There’s nothing to fix?”, which was really really nice, and incredibly needed, after being in a kind of state of low-level despair since the age of 19.

So I had a really nice 4-month period — I left the intentional community in France to live in London for a while, and it felt like a real “I’m healed now” homecoming, reconnecting with friends from school and making new ones through IRL twitter meals and feeling wildly different and charismatic and grounded.

And then I went to JessCamp. And uhhhhhh I did not have a good time.

I felt (and I pieced this together after leaving a day early, during an IFS session) like I was back in secondary school, a young kid intimidated by all the older kids in big groups, all the cool kids who already knew each other and were all problem free and thriving and not struggling one bit, unlike me, the shy small kid who didn’t want to be perceived and was at serious risk of being picked on at any moment. (Outdated emotional schemas are so fucking cringe dude)

Then post-JessCamp I had a 2 week period of “uhh wtf I thought I was Deeply Okay and perfect now, what the fuck was that??”

And then I saw a River Kenna tweet (and I’d love to share a screenshot but I sadly no longer have that privilege) about how he conceptualises healing modalities as being either Mommy Coded™️ or Daddy Coded™️, where Mommy Coded == “you are ok, everything is ok, you can stop, it’s safe”, and Daddy Coded == “you can do more, you can be more, keep going”.

And during my ~4 months of Deep Okayness grace period, the idea of doing any additional thing, like IFS or meditation or whatever, was actually kind of offensive. Like dude, this is the biggest most unprecedented shift I could have hoped for, how ungrateful to imagine needing to do more, plus what a potential waste of resources because I might just be done now.

Whereas JessCamp woke me up to “oh ok sure, I’ve had a big level up in the Mommy-Coded department (everything is ok), but I’m hugely lagging in the Daddy-Coded department — I could still be a lot better, a lot more empowered, agentic, able to show up as my full self, unafraid (of silly imaginary models like “the people at JessCamp are cooler than me and dangerous and probably bullies).

So I’d been noodling on this like “oh shit I think it’s time to level the fuck up” for a while and then when I got suspended from Twitter it was like “alright bet, time to stop consuming the barrage of ideas from other people and actually drop the distractions and tune into what I need to grow”.

(I’ve been conceptualising this new era as “increasing my power”, and/or “being able to do the things I want to do”. There’s a bunch of related stuff like agency, having clearly defined goals/values, etc").

Bye bye twitter & podcasts👋 Oh, hello loneliness!!!

So nice ok, I legit have no power in this twitter spat, so I guess that’s out of the picture, no stress it’s probably what I needed.

And shit, I’m really genuinely burning-ly motivated to just sit with my experience, to do Do Nothing-style meditations and just see what comes up, because I’ve been so low-level distracted for so long and am now so motivated to kick things into gear that that actually feels like a really good idea. I want to increase my power, I want to grow up, I want to be more.

And damn, I’ve been in a total “listen to comedy podcasts for multiple hours a day” era for the past 1.5 years, and now I feel really motivated to stop that too so I have more processing time, more time to attune to what it’s like to be me.

So what’s it like to be me?

Oh fuck. I’m lonely as hell. (And what the fuck am I doing with my life??)

I’ve spent the last 1.5 years digital nomading, moving countries on average every 2 months. I broke up with my long-term girlfriend just before this and lost all my home friends in the process. Then I floated around different countries, too socially anxious to make friends (until Deep Okayness hit in Feb 2024), not even sure where to find them.

So I got in the habit of listening to podcasts a whole bunch, and watching a load of youtube videos, and I started tweeting like 6 months into my digital nomad “adventure”. And holy shit were these things helpful.

I spent a month in Albania, probably socialised 3 times the entire trip, but thanks to my favourite podcast at the time, I kept the loneliness basically entirely suppressed. “Life’s fine, I’ve got purpose via work & I listen to my podcast whenever I’m walking around, no complaints here I’m nicely stimulated”

But now Twitter is gone and I genuinely don’t want to listen to podcasts, and it’s time to make stuff happen IRL.

I actually don’t have a good ending for this, other than that things are actually going reasonably well on that front so far. There’s a good IRL scene in Toronto, and I want to step into my agency by proactively organising the things that I want to exist, and I’ve signed up for an 8 week improv course, a Brazilian Ju Jitsu 1-month taster, I’m gonna do a jhana retreat to hopefully improve my baseline mood, etc etc. I’m proactive! I’m just also a scared little egg!

But the main thing really is that it’s pretty mad how 1.5 years of digital distractions masked this underlying truth, that leaving my home, actually kind of inadvertently scorched-earthing my main friendships, and still being spiritually homeless, has been & continues to be really painful. But maybe Toronto can be a new home. I’m really really sick of the itinerant life, I want genuine IRL friendships and community and to feel good and be able to do what I want to do. Here’s hoping.