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Written Wisdom: On Twitter last night (Or, A Tale of Two Emails)

I woke up this morning to two emails.

One was from a woman at the international office of the university at which I will be doing research in the fall.

The other was from a friend, asking how I set off a mutual acquaintance, to whom I have not spoken since junior year, on Twitter last night.

(WARNING: It’s about to get real angry up in here)

Some background, oh reader: My Twitter account is sort of like my blog, in that I mostly write irreverently about stuff (you know, STUFF) from my own life and pepper it with Central/Eastern Europe and Russia, women’s rights, and my love for Ruth Bader Ginsburg. But mostly it is goofy and trivial. In the last twenty-four hours, for example, I tweeted sardonically about music, a cow statue, The Last Metro, Alice Munro, HGTV, things that my family members said, and mojitos. 

Now, I do not follow the aforementioned person on Twitter, and he has since taken the very brave step of blocking me (while continuing to follow me), but, from what I was able to gather baed on his interactions with others, he took issue with the subject and substance, or lack thereof, of my tweets, and, consequently, of my worldview, chocked it up to my race (damn Caucasian triviality), and concluded that I would never write for a substantial publication.

I am not sure what it was that I said that made this person so angry. Nor do I care. Because here is what I do know:

1. I could be terribly off on all of the above, but, then, this person was terribly off attacking someone on Twitter.
2. Not that I need to defend what I tweet or why I tweet, but: If something really matters to me, I do not try to condense it to 140 characters or less. I would blog it out, not tweet it.
3. It is unfair to my race to make me a representation of it.
4. I’m going to law school, not j-school, so, while I appreciate the threat about where I should and should not write, it will, sadly, never come to fruition.
5. Saying, “Oh, what she writes is trivial” is such a hideously gendered, sexist complaint. And maybe it wasn’t intended that way (because personal attacks are better, I guess), but it is. Half of my male friends on Twitter are writing about basketball. Are they trivial, too?
6. I don’t force anyone to follow me on Twitter. Or on this blog. Or in my life. If you don’t like it, don’t look at it.
7. Attacking someone on Twitter is gross, period, end of story.

But mostly, I know that Eleanor “Can You Believe I Said This Before Twitter?” Roosevelt once said, “No one can make you feel inferior without your consent.” And I know that I clearly let this person make me feel inferior. I just wrote a list of seven things! I’ve been angry and sad about this all morning!

But no more. Neither this person nor anybody else in this world gets my consent to make me feel less substantive based on a Twitter account. Because here is what else I know.

I know that I am smart and strong, and I know that the other email, the one that wasn’t about this nonsense, confirmed that I’m going to study legal dissidence in the Soviet period and its connection to rule of law in Central and Eastern Europe today, and I am serious about that, and about the things I care about and the people I love, and the fact that I tweeted about “Selling London” (fun show, by the way) doesn’t take away from that. And neither does anything that this person tweets about me.

And by the way: If you’re looking for a serious account of the world, you should probably look somewhere other than my Twitter account. Maybe try a substantial publication. I won’t be writing for it.