I recently (according to history recently can date as far back as hundreds of years) joined twitter. So far I find it a very cool social media platform mostly because of the exclusivity. You get to choose who you follow and hence who you see on your timeline. Now, this is not a piece about the merits and demerits of twitter – it’s awesome though – the reason I am telling you this is because one of the people I follow on twitter has bad twettiquette (etiquette on twitter). This person, let’s call him sesquipedalian, will constantly tweet about how nobody is tweeting him and how he needs more followers, so please tell people to follow him. Now, Sesquipedalian is generally a cool person but every time I see a tweet from him on my TL that’s whining I just get angry. In fact I unfollowed sesquipedalian for a while but we talk in our dm a bit so I had to follow him back.
What’s wrong with this though? Isn’t Sesquipedalian just saying things that we all feel? I mean I know days when I have gone hours on end without a single person tweeting me and ended up asking myself questions as to my public behavior. I know you have as well (at
least if you are on twitter). We all have insecurities and yet it seems that it just cooler to put on a brave face and move on. No one wants to be with the person who opens up their heart regularly. We are expected to hide behind a façade of being okay even when we aren’t.
When I was a child I used to cry, a lot, and when I speak of child here I don’t mean 3 years old, I am talking about 10, 12 maybe even 13. I cried at the slightest provocation, I cried to get my way, I cried not to get my way, I cried just for the sake of crying. This really frustrated people and I kept being told real men don’t cry. So I stopped. I haven’t shed a single tear since I was 14. Why? Not because I haven’t been hurt or had moments when I should have cried. Simply because it is a sign of weakness, and no man should show weakness on any level. A real man must show his face as a man who always has his head above the water, a man who always has things in control, a man’s man.
Well you know what I say to that? Those people who tell us to hide all our emotions can go suck on a leaf, a bitter one at that. Now, I am not telling you to go to twitter now and be for followers (have some dignity). What I’m saying is let’s not be cocoons of penned up emotion and covered insecurities. The concept of a real man, is stupid. Sometimes, you just need to let loose and let your emotions take control. After all human beings are beings of emotion, or so I was told.
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