Think Piece About Writer's Retweet of Tweet About Writer Marks New Pinnacle of Self-Referentiality

Once upon a time long ago, blogs were criticized for making us all more narcissistic and self-obsessed. Then, of course, Twitter came along. And now, the fabled "third wall" of self-referentiality has been breached: a lengthy blog post pondering the implications of a writer's retweet of a tweet about the writer's writing. Tell me: what do you think—about me?

The headline of this XO Jane story by Daisy Barringer is "Tom Daley Outed His Troll on Twitter. As Did I," which hints already at the author's ability to use any old widely-discussed public occurrence as a launching point for a discussion about oneself. So, Olympic diver Tom Daley retweeted someone saying bad things about him? Hey, the same thing happened to ME:

This is obviously not the same situation, but it's similar enough that I feel I can draw parallels from it.

SUMMARY: Some CRAZY BITCH said mean things about Daisy ON TWITTER and guess what happened, that's right, Daisy RETWEETED THEM and then Daisy's friends said mean things about THAT BITCH on Twitter and SHE said MORE mean things about Daisy and it was just, OMG, you don't even know.

This would be a good topic about which to compose and publish an essay.

Listen, you can insult me all you want and cc: my boss on messages requesting my dismissal, but if you put something out into the universe, you have to realize that you may not get the reaction for which you were hoping.


I don't necessarily want to create more drama by retweeting someone when they call me a racist or a cunt, but I also don't want people to think they can (indirectly) confront me without repercussion or at least acknowledgement. In this case, being the bigger person implies not standing up for myself, and I'm not sure that is how I want to live my life. Of course, the flipside is that I don't want to spend my time defending myself. Lord knows there aren't enough hours in the day for that.

Especially not after you subtract the number of hours in the day that it takes to write blog posts about THE DRAMA. Daisy, take this think piece home with a strong kicker, will you?

Oh, and for the record? I may be a lot of things, but I am not a bad writer.


[XO Jane. Image via]