<a href="http://www.halfwaytonormal.com/wp-content/uploads/2008/11/2237867555_dbb1865bfb.jpg"><img class="alignnone size-medium wp-image-141" title="2237867555_dbb1865bfb" src="http://www.halfwaytonormal.com/wp-content/uploads/2008/11/2237867555_dbb1865bfb-300x199.jpg" alt="" width="409" height="271" /></a>
<h5 style="padding-left: 330px;">photo by <a href="http://www.flickr.com/people/raulc/">Raul!</a></h5>
OK, I'm wondering: Are some people just addicted to stress and drama? Or do we each have a hierarchy, and when one agitating issue is set aside, the next one in line simply bubbles to the top?

With the election behind us, I somehow imagined I would feel free-and-easy this week. But the last few days have brought a repeat-series of social media anxieties to the surface: <strong>Who am I, and how do I neatly package up my identity in a sentence or two that will stand out in the crowd?</strong>

My identity crisis is rooted, I think, in <a href="http://twitter.com/">Twitter</a> (where I'm kt_writes, not that anyone will rush to sign up for Twitter after reading this). I used to follow 30 or so people. I knew more than half of them personally, and another handful represented only one degree of separation—personal friends of my personal friends. There was plenty of fun, comfortable banter, I didn't worry what people were thinking about me, and the interactions generally helped me feel less alone throughout my solitary days of freelance work.
<h3>Feeling un-cool at the Twitter bash</h3>
When more people began following me (it's sort of like "friending" people on Facebook, but on Twitter it's more common with strangers), I was pleased. That's the whole point of building a network, right? I followed many of them back. Before I knew it, only a small percentage of the tweets I was reading were from people I know. It was starting to feel like I was at a party full of strangers who are mostly ignoring you. And I had dressed all wrong.

To make matters worse, many of the people I started following are very into Twitter stats: how many people follow them, what kind of score they get from <a href="http://twitter.grader.com/">Twitter Grader</a>, how many times they've been <a href="http://www.textism.com/favrd/">Favrd</a>, etc.

Yesterday I even ran across a Twitter bio that reads "<span class="bio">Clearly it's not hip to have anything useful here." I found that both very funny and very sad (and, naturally, it prompted me to re-consider my own bio line). <strong>Who are we trying to be on Twitter? And what's wrong with simply being ourselves?</strong></span>

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I started feeling like I had fallen into the wrong crowd in high school—one that looks cool but actually ends up making you feel lame about yourself, and out of place. I wanted out!

The problem is, there's also an application called <a href="http://useqwitter.com/">Qwitter</a>, which sends a notification when people stop following you. (I refuse to use it, but lots of people do. Then they write Tweets about the people who qwit  them.)

Finally, yesterday, I wrote direct messages to a few people I knew I needed to qwit, for sanity's sake. In my messages, I referenced "too many inside jokes" and "too much focus on numbers and favrds," then I blamed my inability to handle it on my own insecurities. Done.
<h3>Rethinking the definition of "cool"</h3>
I feel better. No one needs to hang around with people who make you feel bad about yourself—in real life or in social media circles—even if that's not their intention. I've found some people who seem to be using Twitter for the reasons I like to use it, and I feel like I'm generally in a community again where I can be me.

And then this morning, I read a great, <a href="http://levite.wordpress.com/2008/11/07/i-lost-the-vote-on-tuesday/">timely post by Jon Swanson</a> on his blog Levite Chronicles. In the post, Jon tells a story about how he entered a contest asking people to define "cool" in a sentence or two. The definition he submitted was this: <strong>"Not caring what people think so creatively that people care what you think."</strong>

Just that definition alone made me feel better. And then Jon goes on to point out the irony of how disappointed he felt when his definition wasn't chosen:

<em>And then I proved how cool I wasn't. Because I cared what someone thought. A lot....</em><em>We are so eager to please. We create dreams and build hopes and come out of our shell to take a chance and then feel betrayed, feel overlooked, think that “see? I’m still the uncool kid I was in 7th grade.â€</em>

Once again, as I wrote in my post <a href="http://www.halfwaytonormal.com/?p=100">Learning about me by reading you</a>, I'm grasping something important about myself by reading someone else's story. I'm reminded that, as humans, we all share a need to be accepted, and that the truest definition of "cool" is being the person I was created to be. (Sure, it sounds cheesy, but it's what I believe.)