Finding my place
How Threads help me realize my role in this world
Three months ago, I made the decision to abandon my Twitter account. The place was so miserable, with the algorithm delivering hateful and angry content. I was checking in on a daily basis, and none of my posts were getting any engagement. The people who have been following me for years didn’t see my content and I didn’t see any of theirs. There was nothing there for me anymore, so I left.
I joined Threads the day it launched (July 5, 2023 🥳), but didn’t really do anything with it. At the time, I rolled my eyes, thinking “great, here’s another platform I have to learn.”
I posted all kinds of content: book stuff, random thoughts, photos from camping. It was a miscellany of my life, and I was fine with one or two comments and a couple hundred views.
My first popular post was a video I posted of the fire department coming to my door (March), earning over a thousand views. In May, I posted a story about a visit to Starbucks at LAX and that went absolutely viral, with more than 250,000 views. I wrote about it in this newsletter, sharing how going viral does not trigger sales and it brings out the best and worst in people.
Over the next month, it was hit and miss with my threads. Some had a couple hundred views, some had a few thousand. Many went into the tens of thousands of views. I wasn’t trying to figure out what people responded to. I didn’t work out a plan of content to share. I wasn’t charting what people commented on. All I do is post with the hope that what I share has value for someone, somewhere.
In early June, I posted a story about magpies, spread out over three threads, and that had hundreds of thousands of views. After that, my numbers were back into the hundreds or low thousands. Near the end of the month, I post a 3-part story about going to see my doctor regarding pain in my toe, and it exploded in the best possible way.
From more than 625,000 views, I earned a few hundred new followers, 50 new subscribers to this newsletter and 60 book sales. I had a diagnosis of gout from people with zero medical expertise. Clearly, not everyone read all three parts, in which I shared my doctor’s diagnosis of tendonitis (and yes, I missed the autocorrect to tendinitis and was ridiculed for that). There were fights happening in subthreads with people arguing about how the medical community (mis)treats women and how women are treated in general online.
A perfect stranger advised me to stop wearing heels; another stranger told him to not make assumptions about someone he doesn’t know. (For the record, I have worn heels twice in my life: at my first wedding, and that one time I erroneously thought I could pull off stilettos).
The story about my toe and how my doctor was recommending Murder on my Mind to all his peri-menopausal patients also prompted conversations about menopause. A woman shared that her foot and toe issues were a symptom of menopause, which in turn led to other women sharing their weird menopausal ailments. All this digital chatter about menopause led to this:
This made me burst into tears. Above all else, one more woman is taking charge of her own health.
When I posted a thread about buying myself an expensive (for me) bike and finding my love for riding again, I did not anticipate the outpouring of support from the Bike Threads community. People were sharing their own stories of getting back on the bike, posting photos of their bicycles, and offering me tips for conquering hills or powering through gravel. I had framed the story around being “a solid woman” who needs good tires and solid rims. Dozens of other “solid women” asked me to share the bike brand and thanked me for inspiring them to try riding again. Cue more tears.
I don’t have any explanation for why my threads are going viral. I suspect I am caught in an algorithmic loop and my content is being served up to a wide audience. I don’t use hashtags, nor do I deliberately use trigger words.
I grew up hiding myself in the shadows, trying to be invisible. I never could have imagined that as an adult, I’d be sharing my stories publicly, much less inspiring anyone. It feels weird to have this kind of attention, but I also sense that this is where I was meant to be all along.
xo Dana
What I’m reading
I’m about to crack the spine on this dark comic novel about grief. I am aware of the contradiction, but I am also very intrigued to see how this rolls out. The book was recommended by someone who never misses the mark for me. We shall see.
