My Twitter Cleansing

Right, so why did I unfollow so many people on Twitter?

It’s simple, really. I couldn’t keep up. It was overwhelming. Twitter had become a burden rather than something fun. Reading everything was impossible… reading anything became impossible.

I came very close to deleting my account but I didn’t want to lose the people that I’ve grown to consider friends. Or, perhaps, people I want to fuck.

So the decision was made to unfollow anyone that I haven’t made any sort of connection with, plus a
small few whose tweets I just enjoy. I went from following close to 700 people down to 58. Some were harder than others to unfollow. People who have followed me for the past year, people I find very likable… but it just had to be done. Who knows? Perhaps I’ll start adding them again sometime, but for right now, I need… want… to keep things very small.

This is in no way a reflection on anyone. I was following some truly great people.

And now my list of followers in dropping, though truly not as much as I expected. If folks want to continue following me, that’s wonderful. But I also absolutely understand anyone who unfollows me after I’ve dropped them. And I’m cool with that.

I got wrapped up in the numbers and Favstar and that isn’t why I joined Twitter. It’s a very slippery slope… watching your numbers, watching your followers, who stars what, making sure you reciprocate, etc., etc. People get so caught up in being pithily clever that they forget that they can use Twitter to actually SAY something. Something of substance.

I’m a passionate person and I have opinions on a great many things. It got to the point on Twitter where I was afraid to express anything other than something funny or sexy… Censoring myself. A shame, that. None of us should limit ourselves in that way.

So, yes, I made some drastic changes. I cut off most people. I won’t censor myself any longer. I trust that the people I’m still following are the ones who will want to hear my thoughts and share their own. It doesn’t always have to be laughs. It can also be tears.

I’m certain that I’m going to regret unfollowing some of the people that I did… but, for right  now, my Twitter feed is just where I need it to be.

Full of friends.

On Trust, Part Two

I’ve posted about trust before… but as I like to do, I’m going to delve in even deeper.

I like to brag about how I give second chances and understand all those gray areas that make people tell lies, etc.

The truth is, now that I think about it on a deeper level, I’m not sure that my trust is ever really fully regained after I’ve been deceived.

I’m thinking about two particular situations. I’ll go into the more boring one first.

It’s a relationship I have with one of my coworkers. This woman and I have had an interesting friendship/working relationship. We are, in most ways, nothing alike. She’s married with a child and she’s one of those women who post on FB all the time about how wonderful her family is and how in love she and her husband are and how everything is perfect.

I know it isn’t. This couple are two of the most financially irresponsible people I know. They’re in their 40s, but they are both children and they have no one to tell them no. So while she’s talking about how happy they are, I know that they are inches from foreclosure at any given moment, they have no savings, a special needs child who they’ve made no future plans for his care after they’re gone.

Also, she absolutely sucks ass at her job. She is the laziest, most entitled person I know. She won’t lift a finger unless she absolutely has to.

Having said that, though, she’s got an incredibly huge heart. She and I are on the bottom rungs of the team we’re on, both making next to nothing. And we forged a friendship out of this. We’re constantly loaning money back and forth… we make a joke that we have about $200 that we just swap. One week, she needs it to pay bills… a couple weeks later it’ll be my turn.

A couple of years ago, we had a falling out at work. It actually had little to do with me… I was in the wrong place at the wrong time and got dragged into a situation where it appeared that I complained to our boss about her. In retaliation, she went to my boss and told her every little thing I’d ever said in exasperation, some things that other people said that she attributed to me and, in general, did everything she could to deflect attention off herself and on to me.

It took months before we could even look at each other, much less speak, and even longer before we all patched things up. Now, people at work say we’re like sisters. She apologized for what she did.

Now, though, even two years later, I still don’t trust her one damn bit. When her ass was in the frying pan, she didn’t hesitate for one second to stab me in the back as hard as she could. And I’m positive that if something like that ever came up again, she’d do it again in a second.

So… no… I won’t ever really trust her again. I love her to bits, but I can’t trust her.

The second situation involves a man I met online. We hit it off instantly… instant, amazing spark. White hot. And then, without going into all the sordid details, I found out that he had lied to me about pretty much every damn thing in his life except his name.

This was far bigger than oh, he’s married and said he wasn’t… which is bad enough… this was lie upon lie upon lie. I blogged about the situation in my post On Trust… about how he’d come clean to me and how I understand why he felt he needed to do the things he did.

And, yes, I do understand. And I do forgive. And I do think he’s a good man that got way the fuck in over his head, in real life and online, and his situation spiraled out of control. I do love him.

But… I can’t trust him. Everything he says to me now, I take with a very big grain of salt. We’re not together and we don’t live close, so I’m not in his world to see if he’s being completely open and honest with me. I like to think he is…. but I thought he was before and he wasn’t.

It’s such a shame. We’re still close and we still talk a lot. I still want to know about his life and I want to share what’s going on in mine with him. I don’t know that I can be intimate with him again, though. At this moment, those feelings are dead within me. I don’t want to give that part of myself to him again. He doesn’t deserve it and I can’t get into it unless I believe my partner is in it just as much as I am… and I can’t be sure of that anymore. Such a damn shame.

I think about how I felt about him before all this happened. How I would have felt about him if I’d known the truth of everything up front. It wouldn’t have mattered to me… I was interested in the man, not the other material things. But now… I don’t know if the man I knew is still the man I know.

And, fuck, I hate that. I hate that he did that to me.

Romance in the internet age is a bizarre thing. It’s so, so easy to lie online. And I think that’s part of the reason I keep it so honest. I may hide details of my real life, but I don’t lie. Maybe I think that if I’m brutally honest, it’ll make up for some of the others who lie as easily as they breathe.

I don’t know, and that’s a subject I’ll get around to blogging about one day soon.

But for now, I’m  just thinking about trust and if it can ever truly be regained once it’s lost. I’m not sure it can be. At least, not quickly… maybe not without years and years of working on it.

Which brings me back to my previous post, Sex And The Married Man. If this gentleman cheats on his wife with me, I’ll be playing a role in the destroying of trust. She will find out. Maybe not today, or tomorrow, or even five years from now, but someday, she will find out that he cheated on her. Maybe not even with me, but I’ll have been the first one that led him down the path of infidelity. And then these two people, mostly this innocent woman that I don’t even know, will be stuck in a marriage without trust.

I know how it’s hurt me to have my trust broken and it’s never been by someone as close to me as a spouse. I just can’t imagine. I can’t be a part of that. That’s not the kind of person I strive to be in my life. I don’t want to be that person. I won’t be that person.

Because trust, once broken, is hard if not impossible to mend.