Who Do You Want To Be Today?

Someone ran over a hedgehog. Posted about it on Twitter. Cried about it there. Asked their followers what to do next—should they still go to their friend’s birthday party? What should they get at Starbucks to feel okay? And everyone weighed in. Hot chocolate or coffee with milk?

Twitter gets used in as many ways as there are people using it. Some people work those 140 characters like they’re trying to carve something real out of the constraints. Others just push news and information. And some people just narrate whatever happens between the train station and the swimming pool—lost water wings, found condoms, doesn’t matter, someone will read it.

I tweet for this blog. Or I did, anyway. Used to dump everything that crossed my mind. Now it gets harder. Because I stopped seeing it as my own space and started seeing it as the voice of something with actual readers. Readers who don’t care about my pizza preferences or who I’m dating. Nobody wants to watch me ramble with friends about their bodies.

So the question is: is there even a right way to use this thing? How personal should it be? Just links and articles, or does the person behind it matter? Does the answer change depending on whether it’s you, or a company, or a magazine trying to have a voice?

The worst instinct is treating every new platform like it needs some professional playbook. Like there’s a way you’re supposed to behave that’s fundamentally different from being human. But maybe that’s the trap. Maybe nothing terrible happens if you share about pizza sometimes, if what you’re sharing is actually interesting. If it’s something worth reading.

I don’t know the answer. Maybe you just pick which version of yourself you’re going to be and commit to it. All-in personal or carefully filtered. Raw or performed. As long as you’re interesting about it. As long as there’s actually something there worth the read.