Meeting strangers online is really good, actually

70% of my life would not look the same if I never started posting on Twitter

I decided to start tweeting in November 2022, a couple months before I launched Headlines, my old newsletter.

The first few tweets I sent out felt mortifying. I had a few hundred followers, most of whom were high school or college friends. I couldn’t stop thinking that everyone was probably judging me.

But I decided to keep going, mostly because I actually had a lot of fun thinking up tweets. I held myself to a relatively consistent schedule of one or two tweets a day and started out posting about mental health-related things and news, because that was what Headlines was about. It also felt less scary than sharing my personal thoughts. I also followed a bunch of people in psychedelics, as well as people into meditation and spirituality and different therapeutic modalities like IFS.

A few weeks in, I stumbled across

christineist

’s doc about TPOT, the amorphous yet defined, legible yet illegible, community of people who are very active in discussing and debating the above topics.

I mass-followed a bunch of people in this space and started replying to people’s tweets. I began sharing more and more of myself, and finding more and more people who resonated with my innermost ramblings and thoughts. Eventually, I began to jump on random Zoom calls with strangers who wanted to chat more.

One of these people turned out to be

pranab

, who was one of the only people who had followed me back. I was overjoyed to find someone who was extremely well-versed on all the things I usually found myself explaining to people — IFS, psychotechnology, the intricacies and nuances of MDMA vs psilocybin vs ketamine therapy, etc. etc. I now consider him one of my best friends and we regularly hang out somehow despite him living in Austin and me living in SF.

A few weeks later, I met

Joseph J. Lam

, who DM’ed me about a tweet that I had nearly decided to not tweet. We got on a call, and then got on another call, and then hung out in person, and then hung out in person a lot more. We now live together. : - )

Many more friendships followed. I met

kat

and

Charley Todd

and it was friendship at first sight. I joined a container that

Cissy Hu

created, which was one of the key reasons I even became aware of an opening at the current team I now work with.

Looking back, It all seemed so inconsequential in the moment. I wrote one, maybe two thoughts a day and then pressed send. Through those thoughts, I met people who changed my life — bit by bit, and yet all at once.

The impact it has had is something that I could never have predicted a year and a half ago. In addition to the amazing friendships I’ve made, I am also far more confident about standing in my voice and sharing what I think in front of thousands of people online. As someone who was terrified to speak up in 3-person work meetings, this is perhaps the most unexpected gift of all.