Twitter & Me
An Origin Story
My new essay over at The American Mind is my thank you to Elon Musk, but I thought I’d tell the full story of my Twitter evolution here.
Not terribly long ago I was a mild-mannered reactionary corporate creative without a Twitter account. Twitter? Who had time to post? I liked reading news and websites and blogs, but I’d spent most of my married life nursing, holding, napping, feeding, bathing, and otherwise hanging out with very young children.
One day I emerged from the laundry room and noticed that for the first time, all the children were out of diapers. They had all stopped trying to constantly fling themselves off tall furniture and into traffic and off swings sets and somehow become mostly civilized. I was ready to rejoin the world.
I enrolled the youngest in Pre-K, dusted off my laptop, and started figuring out what I’d been missing.
I discovered who Amy Winehouse was. I became an Amy Winehouse fan. But before I could get too deep online, I got an offer I could have refused, but didn’t, and accepted the job. It was my first job in an office in ten years. This was a real job, a full-time job, unlike “motherhood.” No one I knew thought motherhood was a real job. They did whatever they had to do to get out from under the crushing yoke of their 1.8 children.
I was so back. I was a mother who had Gone Back. (My two-plus years playing a mother who commuted to an office building every day was a supposedly fun thing I’ll never do again, but that is another story.)
Then, in early 2015, the political buzz in the office picked up. My LEED-certified, environmentally sustainable office building became a hive of Hillary Clinton energy.
A few rebels, mostly the ones in programmer socks who decorated their desks with Funko Pop Star Wars figures, started sticking Bernie stickers onto their cloth cubicle walls. I kept my head down and quietly listened to them start to fret, as somewhere on Fifth Avenue, a shape with lion body and the orange head of a man, tweets savage and pitiless as the sun, slouched towards their fragile post-Obama wet dreams.
My boss liked to read Trump tweets out loud so everyone could hear, and my coworkers would poke their heads over their cubicles and moan and groan and roll their eyes. I would shake my head and try to stop the Cheshire cat smile from spreading across my face. “Who does he think he is?” they would say to each other, baffled. “He thinks he can win?”
My Boomer dad called me after the first debate. “What do you think of Trump?”
“I think he’s the only one who has a chance.”
I sated my thirst for hilarious Trump content on Breitbart News, or r/The_Donald. The Internet was suddenly the most entertaining place to be!
Then one day, I saw my husband typing away on his laptop. He wasn’t working, what was he doing? “I’m DMing with people on Twitter.”
Oh really. People? Strangers? On the Internet?
“Trust me, if I was cheating on you, I wouldn’t be doing it on Twitter, honey. Why don’t you make a Twitter account? It’s fun. You’ll like it.”
I gave my first Twitter account a ridiculous anonymous name. I can’t remember it now. I followed Donald Trump. You could just follow him. I followed some other reporters and politicians and writers I liked. But where were all the memes and jokes?
“Who else should I follow?”
My husband patiently gave me some accounts he liked. I clicked Follow on each one. Why was he following some bro in Orange County with 30,000 followers named Mike Cernovich?
I followed all the ones he told me about, mostly posters who have long since been canceled for their crimes. I was off to the races. I was getting radicalized online. Looking back, it wasn’t the biggest leap for me to take. I was a right-wing tradcath with more kids than my Marxist corporate coworkers were comfortable with me having. I loathed the GOP and everything about it. But still, I was not really political. The only time I’d gotten excited about politics in the last decade was for a few glorious days after Sarah Palin’s convention speech.
“What’s this mean, it says my account is suspended.”
“What did you do?”
“Nothing, I said something mean to a Democrat.”
By my third or fourth account, I’d learned how to avoid suspensions and bans. I’d learned the rules. I was making friends with likeminded people. I lived in a navy-blue shitlib enclave and had no IRL friends who knew the “real” me. None. Zero. Not a single colleague at work, either. I’d never even been in the same room with a conservative in real life who I wasn’t related to.
But on Twitter, I was not alone. I had very few followers, but I had, for the first time, allies.
During the summer of 2019, I got banned yet again. My crime was something so dumb, like making a Willie Brown joke about Kamala Harris. I would never punch down like this now, of course.
“That’s it. I quit Twitter.”
But when you are a writer, you need ways to procrastinate. The more the better. And I was still a writer, just a working-from-home writer again. I’d gotten pregnant unexpectedly just after getting promoted at my corporate job, but I wasn’t going to be that kind of office mommy: the kind that outsources their baby to strangers. Yeah, no thanks. Instead, I took an extended maternity leave and then peaced out of there. Haha! I showed them!
I even finagled a new contract job at the same company, doing even more interesting projects—from home. If you will it Dude, it is no dream.
“Maybe I’ll just make one more account.” How else would I procrastinate? I couldn’t go back to the Vanilla-net now. My online tastes were….singular. I needed action.
A new name popped into my head. It wasn’t taken. “Peachy Keenan?” my husband laughed.
“It’s ironic, as in, everything’s just peachy keen!”
“It makes you sound Irish.”
“Well, I am part Irish.”
While I am in fact one-eighth Irish, there are no Keenans in my family. But it stuck. I am Peachy, she is me. Je suis Peachy!
And that kids, is how your mother became the internet micro-personage she is today. Twitter really was a lifeline to me when I was lost at sea in my coastal blue enclave.
Now, with Elon Musk at the helm, I don’t have to worry about getting tossed overboard as often.
Thanks for reading!
Love, Peachy
From one ex-“corporate creative” to another, well done! Your essays are fantastic.
Peachy I love your writing, I am glad Kane/CFP feature you often! I’ll have to find you on Twitter now!