Just for the record, I am extremely self-critical of the words I put on my page. I'm acutely aware of the amount of eyes I have on me, and it's extremely stressful knowing everything you say has to include everything, every exception, every nuance, all in 280 characters.

Because if you do not, it is inevitable that people will assume the worst and call you out on your lack of nuance, forcing you to talk about everything you didn't include, to endlessly clarify your stance to people determined to see the worst in you and to make you see it too.

It's overwhelming and it has been utterly detrimental to my mental state and to an extent my self-image, and there are probably hundreds of tweets that I've written but never posted because I knew I would not be strong enough to deal with the public scrutiny of bad faith actors.

Everything some of you think I am; arrogant, pretentious, blind, narrow minded, self-righteous, don't think I haven't thought it. Or that I haven't painstakingly fretted over whether or not you're right, and sometimes found that you were, and made amends where possible.

The truth is I can never give the perfect advice, nor be the perfect public personality. All of of you, like me, have your own experiences, and things I've overcome and the lessons I've learned along the way will not be applicable to everyone. I don't ever assume it is.

All this to say that whenever I make a statement on my page, I am expecting your scrutiny and I welcome constructive criticism. But your assumptions of malicious intent, of my lack of self-awareness, your thinking that I "need to be taken down a notch"? That fucking hurts.

At all times I try hard to do right by as many people as I can, and the reality of this platform coupled with the size of my audience is that I can not. It embitters me, the bad faith, the inevitability of being made to feel like a terrible person every time I speak out.

And if you're thinking "well, if you don't want people to think you're a terrible person then don't say terrible things."

Way ahead of you. And you know what? You're right, except I don't believe that's a fair judgement of me.

I have a group of absolutely wonderful, empathetic, kickass friends from all walks of life. If the company we keep is a reflection of who we are, I'm either incredibly lucky, or not actually that much of a terrible person in reality.

Flawed, sure. But not terrible.

I've had to go to therapy and do extensive work to finally believe that myself, and I can't deny the role Twitter has played and continues to play in making that difficult. I would advise people who struggle with similar feelings to regularly take a break from this place.

There's no meaningful conclusion to this post, just typing out my thoughts and feelings. I'll continue to post things that I believe might be helpful, though I will likely engage less with comments going forward.

Shit's hard, I'm doing my best.