WHAT WOULD TWITTER DO?

Welcome to Week 4 of What Would Twitter Do? in which ten of my favorite people on Twitter talk about their Twitter philosophies, their do’s and don’ts, and what they make of the medium in general. This week I speak with the poet Mira Gonzalez (@miragonz) who was born in 1992 in Los Angeles. She is the author of I Will Never Be Beautiful Enough To Make Us Beautiful Together (Sorry House, 2013) and her tweets and her poetry share a world: drugs, sex, loneliness, laziness, recklessness, self-loathing—she writes about these things in an extremely humourous and warm manner. 

I wasn’t sure to what extent her performance on Twitter was just that, so was surprised when (asking her to contribute to a book I was putting together) her email reply was prompt, professional, incredibly polite—the opposite of what I would have expected from how she appeared online. It seemed we were suddenly living in a strange and backwards world, where a person’s public persona might be scattered and dissolute, and their private persona, professional and straight. A recent popular tweet of hers: “‘success is the best revenge’ seems horrifying. id much rather just egg someones house or something.” 

Her feed is brilliantly open, spontaneous, artful and unabashed. I was eager to speak to Mira for this series.

– Sheila Heti

SHEILA HETI: What do you think about before you tweet? You once told me that you tweet what makes you feel uncomfortable. So which tweets do you reject, which do you accept?

MIRA GONZALES: I wouldn’t necessarily say that I tweet what makes me feel uncomfortable, I think it’s more that I feel comfortable tweeting things that I would never feel comfortable saying in a real life conversation, or even in other places on the internet. For reasons that I don’t fully understand, Twitter is a place where I don’t feel ashamed to say my most shameful thoughts. And, generally speaking, I think my most shameful thoughts are the things people relate to the most, because everyone has questionable thoughts sometimes, and it’s easy to feel incredibly alienated and lonely when you feel like nobody else is having those thoughts too. 

I often get asked by people ‘Is your Twitter real?’ and things of that nature. I’m never sure how to respond to that. My Twitter account is completely ‘real’ in that everything I tweet is something I have earnestly thought or something that has actually happened to me, but of course there are a ton of mundane and non-humorous things that happen to me, which I don’t tweet about because they are not entertaining...