So about the dog thing

Let's address it once in one place and we won't have to repeat ourselves. I've always had a rough, unhealthy relationship with social media spanning many years. Before that it was forums, irc chat rooms, icq and yup, even newsgroups. I've been back and forth, off and on and tried many things to maintain a healthy relationship with it. None of them panned out. So, eventually I cut myself off, put a person in between me and social media and started going to therapy. The results of that were ongoing, gradual and not obvious to an outside eye because that's not really the point of therapy. It's not to fix your appearance to the outside world. Therapy is for you, it's to slowly fix what's broken in you. If it can't be fixed, you instead reroute around the broken thing. This is one of several principles behind cognitive behavioral therapy, if you can't fix a behavior entirely. you rewire your brain to instead avoid it, cope with it and lessen its effect on your mental wellbeing.

It wasn't my intention to come back to social media this soon. I'm not 100% ready, but circumstances demanded it. My employee and friend Cris who handles my social media and various other duties for the company lost his mother very recently, in a particularly painful way, like there's any other kind. His bereavement leave is as long as he needs it to be, I took his duties over in the meantime. He is my dear friend and trusted colleague. He gets as long as he needs and maybe, it was time for me to take this role back, perhaps for good.

Doing that, knowing and being very self aware of my problems and weaknesses dealing with social media, requires coping mechanisms and techniques. Some are overt and obvious, some not. If people thought the purpose of going into therapy was to change me into a lovely nice person who'd never confront, never argue, never fight or insult, they don't know what therapy is. You can't completely alter a persons personallty. Thats not therapy that's brainwashing. These traits make up who you are. I am a confrontational, brash, confident to the point of arrogance person. I will fight when I perceive wrongdoing. I will confront behavior I deem unethical head on without concern for being polite about it. I will go after a person of stature who I think is abusing their position and I won't apologize for it. That is who I am. That is who I have accepted that I will be. PR is the act of hiding your flaws and enhancing your strengths. What going to therapy taught me was not how to do PR. It's not a public relations seminar, it's medical treatment. What it taught me, hopefully well enough (we will see) is how to do the things I am wired to do, without it having a degrading, negative effect on my mental state. It let me stop caring too much, it let me stop taking things so personally, it let me disconnect parts of me that were emotionally investing into things they shouldn't be and prevent that from doing further damage. Therapy didn't make me a 'nice' person on twitter, it made me into someone who can be ok with sometimes not being.

If that's not what you hoped for, that's unfortunate. Some people want me to live up to an imagined idealized standard of what they think I should be. One of the many perils of fandom, building up people you like to inhuman standards that they can't achieve. Some see my recent aggressive barbs against certain people and organizations as 'slipping back into my old, unhealthy ways'. What they don't see, is what's going on in my head. The stress is gone, the worrying, the self doubt, the obsession. That is what a healthy relationship with social media boils down to. It's not never getting into fights, never arguing, never upsetting anyone. It's about you being ok with yourself, making peace with who you are and when the day is over, being able to walk away.

Does that mean you can discard the responsibility and power of a large audience? No, of course it doesn't. Everything you say has to be said with consideration to potential harm vs potential good. Minimize harm, maximize benefit to others. Understand your influence. Use it fairly and responsibly. So far since coming back, I've done just that and I'm happy with how it's gone. I wouldn't change a thing. Not one.

As for the dogs? Mental positive reinforcement. Twitters terrible, but you can make it a bit less terrible. I love dogs. Grew up with them, only briefly lived without them. Dogs make me happy. Sharing pictures of my followers dogs makes me happy and it makes them happy too. Doing it makes Twitter a place I want to be, rather than a place I have to be. It keeps my impression of it positive, it associates positive thoughts with it constantly. It is coping, it is conditioning. It is rewiring parts of a broken circuit, bypassing others.

As long as I'm still ok and still here, I'm gonna keep retweeting viewers dog photos. Always, couple at a time. It's not going to stop unless the photos stop coming in, which I hope they won't. I've been sent over 2500 dog photos in 2 days, which means I can only feasibly retweet a small fraction. But I see em all and feel free to resend them after a couple of days if I don't retweet yours, maybe you'll get it next time and I hope that makes you happy. I also hope you don't take not being retweeted as a slight. Your dog is lovely, all dogs are. I have over 700,000 people following me and a lot of them are dog owners. I can't show all of them. I'd considered a hashtag to let people easily browse, but the problem with that is how easily hashtag can be hijacked and trolled to hurt others. I'm not ok with that. Retweeting is the best way to do it rather than image posting directly since users can easily turn off my retweets without unfollowing, muting or blocking and maintain functionality. That's my sensible compromise. I could flood your feeds until you leave and I wouldn't really care. My number of twitter followers is not something I put any stock in, but I also don't wanna be a dick about it. Anything that's not a dog photo, won't be retweeted, I'll just post it regularly in my own words. Retweeting is now for dogs and twitter let's you turn off retweets for individual accounts. That's your 'anti spam' solution and I won't hear out any further complaining on the matter now that you know that and have all the power to 'fix' it yourself.

Please keep sending me photos of your dogs, forever. Please don't send them if you aren't ok with potentially being retweeted to 700000 people. Be prepared for what that could potentially cause, which will hopefully be nothing negative at all.

That's a glimpse inside my head. I am fine. I am mentally as well as I think I've ever been. Despite continuing to fight a disease you're not supposed to win against (oh sorry, you picked the wrong man to fuck with if you wanted an easy fight), the pain, the side effects, I may be the happiest I have been in a long time. I appreciate the concerns, but you have little choice but to trust my account of how I'm feeling and what my brains doing. For the time being at least, this is what you get and you can choose to go with it, or go elsewhere. For maybe the first time, I think I'm truly ok with either outcome.



Cats are rubbish.