Twitter me this . . .

I’ve worked very hard to construct a storyline in which I’m neither embarrassed nor sad that I clean houses and pet sit.

All of my siblings and most of my friends have retired from long, successful careers, and have steady retirement incomes and savings, own homes, boast A+ credit scores, and are living in a now that was once a future for which they’d planned.

I never managed that. When once I had saved enough to be headed toward a time when I wouldn’t have to worry about living on the street, it evaporated in a combination of foolishness and spinelessness, and by the time I stood up for myself, there was nothing left on which to stand.

My author photo during my short stint as columnist.

I started over. And, purely by accident, I started a Twitter account. I had been hired to write for an online magazine and management asked that we all promote ourselves and the publication on social media, in particular, on Twitter.

It wasn’t long before I realized the platform was a hangout for authors and editors and literary agents and publicists and readers who loved books as much as did I. In short order I screwed my courage to the sticking place and Tweeted one of my favorite authors, Elizabeth McCracken. And she responded. And thus was the door opened to a world I’d never imagined, a world about which I still pinch myself, having difficulty believing I’ve found this community, and they seem to like me.

Meeting Elizabeth McCracken, my first Twitter author

You see, as a child, I started reading before I went to school. My aunt, Sissie, taught me and encouraged my love of books and words and writers. I was in the single digits when I fell in love with Dorothy Parker and the legend of the Algonquin Round Table. I was in the single digits when I discovered Joan Didion in the pages of my aunt’s Saturday Evening Post magazines. My aunt wanted me to be a writer. In fact, she insisted that I was a writer, whether I wrote or not, she believed I had the soul of a writer.

Soul aside, when I first signed on to Twitter, I was at a low point in my life where I had lost definition. Who I was, who I was going to be, those things were up for grabs. I was all in pieces, and as I put myself back together in a new shape, Twitter and the people I met there were integral to this new Charlie.

I often think how delighted Sissie would be to know I’d lunched with an editor from St. Martin’s Press in a Manhattan restaurant. That I’d received advance copies of books by amazing authors she would love. That I chat regularly with writers, editors, publicists, and other devoted readers, in what I consider to be my own Algonquin Round Table. Bloomsbury Group. Violet Quill Group.

And it all began and continues and thrives on Twitter.

So, I don’t have savings or retirement or own a home or have a plan for my future; I have this world on Twitter. And it’s real. The friendships are real. I go there for laughs and for insight and for suggestions on what to read next and who to follow and to converse and commune with people who think like I do, feel about things much the same way as do I, and it borders on magical.

If you doubt that magic and community are possible on a social platform, please check out Her Grace, Duchess Goldblatt, on Twitter. She is the center of a community of loving, curious, wonderful people for whom following a self-proclaimed “fictional character” not only makes perfect sense, but is essential to our well-being and happiness. And Her memoir, Becoming Duchess Goldblatt, is a deeply moving and literate description of Her journey from troubling times in the real world to joyful celebration of humanity on Twitter.

And so when I’m barely able to stand straight and my arthritic hands and feet are screaming out after a day of house cleaning, or, I’m peed on or scratched or exhausted by dog sitting, coming to my Twitter world takes all that away. Not forever. Not in a delusional way. But for at least a moment.

I like the Charlie I am on Twitter. I love the friends I have on Twitter. I am awestruck and warm-hugged every time I remember that I have been dubbed “Snuggly rascal, sweethearted tenderlove” by Her Grace, The Duchess Goldblatt.

I don’t want the whims of a near-sociopathic billionaire to destroy my neighborhood and chase away my friends. And I’m going to hold on as long as I can, and hope.