Author: Jason Rehmus

I posted the above tweet to tell people I wasn’t going to be around much and to let them know how they can keep in touch with me. Despite Twitter’s usefulness over the last few years, I’m avoiding it now as an experiment to see what changes come about for me in two important areas of my life: my social connections and my creative expression.

I lived an isolated life for a long time. Services like Twitter gave me an opportunity to connect with people when I had no easier way to connect. In fact, it was the relationships I formed on Twitter that sustained me and provided comfort and hope through the most difficult time of my life. When I didn’t have anyone nearby to rely on, I could get in touch with friends all around the world for encouraging words and smiles of support. I stepped out of that isolation a year ago, and Twitter hasn’t kept pace.

When I was just beginning to realize I have a unique voice and valuable things to say, Twitter provided a chance for me to speak and be heard in a way I didn’t have before. I thought I was good with words, and posting to Twitter gave me a hundred chances a day to see if I was right. Those short posts became the primary outlet for my creativity. That was helpful for a time, but I’ve got bigger things to do and more stories to tell.

It’s too easy to read my Twitter stream and feel like I’m connecting with people, when I actually crave something much deeper that’s passing me by as I stare at my phone. The seeds for the stories I’m working on get washed away in that same stream when I drop them there instead of holding on to let them grow and develop. I’ve got to step back.

These first three weeks have been tough on me. I’ve felt frustration and some more of that old isolation, but I know things don’t have to stay that way. Adding this sort of friction to my life has prompted me to find different ways to pursue my goals and clear new paths for my upgraded routines. It’s good, and it’ll get even better as I continue moving forward.

You’re not going to see me on Twitter, but I’m still around and hoping to connect with you and everyone else. You can email me any time. If you’re nice, I’ll even give you my phone number so you can text or call when something’s on your mind.

I recently posted two tweets that caused a bit of an uproar in my life. While using sarcasm to remark on the public nature of funding Kickstarter projects, my words were misconstrued and completely twisted to mean things I’d never intended. In one case someone actually posted my full name alongside my Twitter username and accused me of doing the very thing I was speaking out against!

I deleted both tweets because their presence online wasn’t adding enough value to the conversation to warrant the backlash I was experiencing. The fact that I removed them and expressed regret about the misunderstanding doesn’t matter, though. The attacks continue, fueled by a fake tweet that was created to smear me.

Not long after the initial backlash started, someone used some basic graphics tools to make it look like I had tweeted a racist remark. I never did post that remark, and I never would say anything like that at all. The people in my life would know instantly that’s not something I would ever think, let alone say.

If that wasn’t bad enough, people began emailing my employer and attaching that fake tweet to their emails. Their stated intent was to inform my employer that her company’s reputation was at risk because this representative (me) was saying very nasty things in very public places. The truth is, they were just trying to make me look bad and cause me to lose my job because they didn’t like what I had posted on Twitter.

I hesitated writing about this situation because I don’t want to give anyone more of my words to twist, and the accusations are frankly ridiculous. I’m also pretty sick of talking about all of this, so I’ll just let you read what my employer has to say:

Hi [redacted],

Thanks for getting in touch. Any tweets written by Jason and published on his personal twitter account are his, and he has never made claim that they are at all representative of CoSupport, myself, or any other employees of my company.

I definitely stand by your right and Jason’s right to express any opinion you may have, but I won’t ever accept people trying to smear another human being simply because they have a difference of opinion. I know Jason realized his mistake – however impassioned it was – and deleted a tweet that came across as immature and threatening. He also apologized for publishing it and acknowledged his wrong doing. What he didn’t do is delete a tweet that contained a racial slur, because he never wrote that. It’s clear to anyone who has ever used a computer at length that the tweet you’ve constructed to smear Jason was done so in MS Paint. The tell-tale sign is the over pixelization of the text, as MS Paint can’t process fixed-width fonts in JPG format correctly. That, and the bad attempt at cut and paste that anyone with a good monitor will notice because of the shadow outline you forgot to blur.

What offends me more than you trying to smear Jason, rob him of his right to public opinion, and your attempts to ensnare my company’s reputation in your hateful game is that you use MS Paint. I know it is an easy program to use and you probably did so on a work-issued computer that had it preinstalled, but there are so many other screen grab options for you out in our modern world. My favorite is Skitch, though not the most recent version released after their acquisition by Evernote. I would point you instead to the next-to-latest version, here:
http://www.oldapps.com/mac/skitchformac.php

You’ve also neglected to recognize that you are doing exactly what Jason tweeted he wanted to do to someone who frustrated him, except Jason was mature and insightful enough to change his mind. He also apologized, humbly, for his mistake. I’ve known Jason a very long time and employed him happily for years, because he shows strength of character even when responding to his own bad behavior. I hope that you spend more time learning from this than making up fake email addresses, names, screenshots, and complaints to send to me.

Yours,

— Sarah Hatter
Founder & Awesome Lady
cosupport.com

PS, when you publish this on whatever weird hate-mongering troll user forum alt.site you’re a part of, please make sure to spell my name correctly. It has an H on the end. People get this wrong a lot and I’m just really trying to get some consistency in my google alerts.

The best response I can muster to this entire situation is to say I truly hope for the best in the lives of everyone involved.

• If you’re happy, may that feeling be magnified in your life.
• If you’re confused, may you find clarity.
• If you’re sad, may you find joy.
• If you’re proud of your work, may you feel appreciated by those closest to you.
• If you’re angry, may you find peace.
• If you’re filled with hate, may you feel loved.
• If you’re encouraged, may you find opportunities to share that spark with others around you.

Truly.