In what would be my final tweet, I wrote that I’d discovered a new, “surprisingly good” organic soda and asked if any of my followers had tried it. But before they could answer, my account had vanished, along with more than 80,000 tweets expressing the triumphs, tragedies and transient moods of the past three years of my life.

I had suddenly, without warning, deleted my Twitter account. Or to use the popular term, I’d “committed Twittercide.”

Not even my closest friends had seen it coming, though I’d been planning it for weeks. It had been a calculated decision to keep it to myself; I didn’t want anyone to talk me out of it.

* * *
Twitter was, I’d often insisted, a fantastic marketing tool as well as a terrific “writing practice.” As a journalist, I lived by William Faulkner’s tenet of “you must kill your darlings” (i.e., delete excess words and literary self-indulgences), and Twitter, with its “140 character or less” tweet limit, forced me to craft short, punchy sentences to express my thought of the day. Or the hour. Or sometimes, literally, the minute.

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