My sister, a ridiculously hardworking senior teacher at a comprehensive school in Sheffield, has enough on her plate. She is busy doing a very real job with important consequences for future generations of young people—a job that doesn’t involve oversharing about her mental health on the internet and does involve trying to persuade teenagers to read the canon.
So I did feel suitably embarrassed and diva-ish when I first called her, a couple of years ago, to request that she take on another task—manning my Twitter account.
Because she is a terminal people-pleaser, she complied, and we have now devised a system in which I can only access my X account when she kindly sends me a code from her phone. As I am a journalist and editor—and thus require my X account for professional activities both important (such as finding writers to commission) and not (promoting my unhinged column)—I bother her for the code not infrequently.
“Why,” I hear you ask, “have you saddled your sister with this task?” Well, to be clear, it is not because I am overwhelmed by traffic from my measly 400 followers. It is because unfettered access to my X account quite literally drives me insane. In fact, when I chart my biggest mental health lows over the past few years, they almost all coincide with heavy use of the platform.
There are two reasons for this. First, X is a particular kind of kryptonite for OCD, which is often characterised by lingering feelings of guilt and a compulsive urge to check things. The black-and-white nature of the discourse on X, in which you can be marched out of the village by a pitchfork-wielding mob for the simple act of liking or retweeting something they disagree with, sends me into OCD overdrive.
Whenever I’m on the platform, I’m in constant fear of my finger slipping or my brain malfunctioning and of accidentally retweeting something harmful or offensive, and thus ending my career, losing all my friends (catastrophising? Me? Never!) or becoming (my worst fear!) X’s “person of the day”, trending internationally because of my awfulness.
The second reason is less specific to OCD: X makes me sick because I love it too much. Unlike Instagram, Facebook or any other platform, X is dangerous for me because it so perfectly hacks into my reward circuitry.
As a classic bullied-kid turned over-ambitious writer, I don’t care that much about being pretty or popular, the characteristics that Instagram and TikTok most reward, but I do desperately want to post witty asides and resonant hot takes that people are amused by and marvel at.
I so want to be good at X that any crumb of validation I receive on the platform—a like, a retweet, a comment—delights me so completely that I am desperate for more, all while being petrified of losing, by making a misstep, the modicum of digital goodwill I have acquired.
The intensity of this tightrope walk is too much to bear—I notice that if I have spent excessive time on the platform, my entire psychology starts to change. I begin to think in tweets, imagining how some utterly banal interaction I’ve had can be packaged up as an amusing anecdote. My tolerance for nuance becomes subtly eroded—I find myself quicker not just to anger but to full-on outrage,.
Too much X fills me with such cynicism and self-loathing that it nicely paves the way for the hopelessness that can spark a depressive episode. And so by putting a barrier between myself and my destructive addiction, my sister commits the ultimate act of familial service.
With X in the spotlight after Elon Musk’s worrying platforming of far-right misinformation and dangerous stoking of unrest in the UK, many are mourning the Twitter that once was. Though I know I should, as a journalist, be part of their number, I have to admit I am not. Nothing would give me greater relief than if X were to collapse altogether. My sister deserves a day off.
