I quit Twitter and it made me happier. So why have I gone back?

I’m dabbling with Twitter after a year away from it. I had to start again from scratch. It was never my intention to permanently deactivate my account, only to come off while I finished the draft of a book. But I left it too long and when—draft completed—I went to log back in, I no longer existed. Perhaps that was a sign, I thought, that I’d be better off without the little blue bird in my life, but I missed the book chat and the jokes. Would I not go to a big party, I reasoned with myself, just because there were some people there I didn’t agree with? I dived in.

And I love it! What a joy to be in touch with these beautiful people, lots of whom I know in real life, but not at the level where we’d be emailing each other or going on holiday together. How I missed them! And the jokes! Twitter is so good at jokes. I find it exhilarating when people talk to me, follow me, or like me. The part of me that likes attention is hair-flickingly pleased about it all. My more vulnerable self, the self who often feels like a slug about to be deluged with salt, is highly wary and suspects I’ll find out that what I’m nostalgic for is Twitter in about 2012, when it was a place for the curious and generous, before everyone became so angry.

This bit of me thinks I have allowed nostalgia—so dangerous when it comes to addiction—to lure me back into a cauldron of squabble, sycophancy and vitriol, and that it will end in tears. Mine, probably, when I can’t cope with the pain of the world being sliced and diced for my delectation anymore, and I’m embarrassed that I’ve tweeted something cheerful on top of dreadful news or the anniversary of something sad.

And it does eat up time, of course, and makes me ignore real people.

“Did you hear any of that?” my son, Matt, asked me yesterday.

“What’s that, darling?”

“You’re looking at your phone and not listening to me.”

Caught red handed. To my great shame, I tried to lie, claiming I was doing something for work, but he saw through it.

“You were laughing. You’re on Twitter, aren’t you?”

And it was true. I had picked up my phone to reply to an email but I had “accidentally” got pulled into Twitter and was enthralled to the point that I didn’t notice what was going on around me.

I will need rules. None in the morning, or I will never write anything longer than a tweet ever again. I need to stick to not looking at my phone when I’m with Matt, and must turn it off for the night at 7pm. And no lurking. For some reason, Twitter doesn’t seem to make me anxious if I am participating, only if I’m watching and consuming but not saying anything.

So far, it isn’t making me anxious. This might be something to do with the power of writing. I wrote in this column a couple of months ago that the thought of sharing work on Twitter made me feel sick with anxiety. Writing down and sharing the fear seems to have shifted it, and it occurs to me that I might be able to use Twitter as a bootcamp for difficult emotions. If I can learn to tolerate my discomfort there, then I can do it anywhere.

Because Twitter is a microcosm for the big life questions: How can we laugh when others are suffering? How do we bear witness without being incapacitated by our distress? To whom do we owe our attention and compassion? I rejoined just as Theresa May resigned and people discussed whether or not it was OK to be sad when she cried. Personally, I wasn’t moved by her, perhaps because I’m a bit allergic to politicians banging on about loving their country, but I was interested in the debate. I think we are designed, as human beings, to respond to reach other’s pain, and it would be sad if we attempted to beat that instinct out of ourselves because we don’t approve of the individual in distress. I didn’t make that point on Twitter, of course, because I felt the nuance would be lost.

I will have to be careful. Like all addictive things, doing it makes me want more of it and already my self-care has dipped. I feel less inclined to spend time on the things I know are good for me—cooking, running and meditating—and more inclined to binge on Twitter, depressing myself by gorging on Brexit news and then cheering myself up with the jokes.

I tell myself that if I can control my addictive tendencies with it, then it can be a good way to be in touch with people I like. It’s a big if. I remember everything I’ve read about how social media companies use the same psychology as fruit machines to keep us paying out, but they want our attention rather than our money. I feel myself craving the bright lights and dopamine bursts, like a gambler might long to see a row of cherries come up. My hand twitches to pick up my phone… See you on Twitter.