Musings from Left Field

I’m not into the num­bers. Lately every­thing in social media seems to push you to quan­tify your place and rank in the world. I have very lit­tle inter­est in doing this for myself, but there is one num­ber mile­stone I hit this week that took me by surprise.

1000.

I have tweeted over 1000 times on Twit­ter since Octo­ber 14, 2008. While most pro­lific Twit­ter­ers would roll their eyes at this num­ber, to me it matters.

When I started, I was afraid of my voice. Back in Octo­ber I did not believe I had that much to say. I am an intro­vert (this point can be debated in another post), and I can’t pos­si­bly say that much to strangers and still retain my san­ity. I recharge when I am quiet, when no one is around, and when I don’t feel like I have to inter­act. If Twit­ter had been a real cock­tail party, I’d be asleep in a booth at the bar by 9:30pm with­out a sin­gle drink in me. While I think aloud and talk a bit, it was not fit to broad­cast. At least I didn’t think so.

Twit­ter changed that. For 8 months, I twit­tered obser­va­tions of every­thing I came across. If you’ve ever spent a few days with me, you can tes­tify that I switch sub­jects and gen­res. ALOT. Think of a sym­phony. Each thought is a dif­fer­ent note. Played by hun­dreds of instru­ments, or sub­jects. Some­times it sounds like a warm up, and some­times we get har­mony. Rarely. While I couldn’t get EVERYTHING into the tweet stream (I can’t type that fast) I did get just enough to record a glimpse of what I was expe­ri­enc­ing, think­ing, and inter­ested in.

Maybe the most inter­est­ing result of my 1000 tweets is I can start to define what I really care about. When so many things and ideas and resources swirl in my head, com­mit­ting to cer­tain sub­jects is dif­fi­cult. This has been part of my strug­gle to nail down a blog topic. Put them all together, and I find I have plenty to say on sev­eral key topics.

While I can’t say I’ll always stick to the sub­ject, I can say that my 140,000 char­ac­ters con­vinced me to com­mit to writ­ing about those top­ics in this blog and not to fear my voice. I’ve learned there is always some­one lis­ten­ing. Even if it’s just me, it was and IS worth the effort.

PS– A big should out to Jen­nifer Navarette, or @epodcaster, who not only exposed and guided me in Twit­ter, but also care­fully chal­lenged the notion that I had noth­ing to say. You have some seri­ous power. I’m a huge blab­ber­mouth now.

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So @shelleyrae revealed this Shelley’s voice. What have you learned from your first big chunk of tweets?