Time Taking

I spent the day combing through my "Following" list. Something in me told me this task needed to be dealt with before the number reached 1,000. And to tell you the truth, I was about 100 away from that 1,000.

As I combed through the list, I realized how my following that large amount of blogs was preventing me from having a more intimate experience.

I was on Twitter before it became popular--before hashtags. In the beginning, I refused to follow more than 30 people; time progressed and I reluctantly agreed to 60. At some point in that Twitter journey, I became ill and used that platform to disseminate information about chronic illnesses.

As time passed, I watch my "Follower" number increase substantially and overwhelmingly. I couldn't keep-up with it all, but felt uneasy about not following back in order to dialogue with others about chronic illness. To lighten the guilt, I decided following 100 would be my cap.

Still more time passed as I watched my chronic illness friends being followed by 1,000 people and reciprocating those follows. I would say to them: "There's no way you can interact with that many people."

What I didn't realize was that a good number of people didn't want to interact, they were comforted by simply reading about others' chronic illness journeys. Plus, some people followed for research reasons, especially the non-profit organizations, looking for our stories about being disabled by chronic illness.

As time progressed, I felt the need to remove my "Following" cap so that I could better serve people. Because of that shift in consciousness, I found vital information from doctors who were living with my exact illness; I was so lucky to grow a relationship with TWO of those doctors. Twitter's chronic illness community is why I am still ALIVE today (and that's no exaggeration). Having that vital information from others who were going through it and those who had already been through it was key.

So I've cleaned a bit, curating to make the best of my Steemit experience. On Twitter I didn't have a lot of bot followers, but Steemit is another playing field, and social media has changed so much since I was born on Twitter at:

10:57pm on Tuesday 19th Jun, 2007.

But I like it here, and I hope my experience and interaction continues to thrive.

~Missnikkiann (@missnikkiann)