What I learned from reading *all* my old tweets

Every so often, a celebrity is castigated over their "youthful indiscretions" i.e. racist Tweets they sent when they were a teenager.

I don't think I've posted anything too horrific, but I wanted to check. I searched Twitter for a variety of slurs sent from my account - and all seemed clean. But... there's a lot of stuff that's not so easy to find with a simple search.

So I decided to read every single Tweet I'd written since 2008. That's a lot of crap to wade through!

I built a site - Twistory.ml - and every day it shows me what I was Tweeting "on this day". I launched it a year ago and have been reading it faithfully each morning.

This is what I learned:

I'm not racist! And I'm not misogynistic!

Well, that was a relief! I mean, I didn't think of myself as being a bigot - but you never really get an objective view of your past life, do you?

But, not everything I've posted is solid gold...

Bad takes.

Sometimes it was entertaining to see what predictions I'd made which came true. Other times... yeah - looks like I called that one wrong!

I actually think it's an important thing to do. We often remember just how right we are. But it is vital that we recognise when we made mistakes.

Some things easily taken out of context.

Looking at some of my messages with a critical eye, it is easy to see how some things could be misconstrued. What reads as obvious sarcasm to me, doesn't always come across to others. It's depressingly easy to misunderstand something.

Where did all my friends go?

Looking through my messages, I see lots of replies to accounts which no longer exist. Some are people who have delete their accounts. But quite a lot of the accounts were suspended. Did they go full racist? Were they hacked? Were they always foreign bots?

I'm so tedious

I have a repertoire of about 5 jokes, I talk to mostly the same people, I complain about the same things year-in year-out.

I can't splel

My spelling is atrocious at times. I can blame mobile keyboards - or the fact that Twitter doesn't have an edit button - but it is just me being crap and lazy.

Fights I shouldn't have started

I saw a few tweets of me being needlessly obnoxious to people who would go on to be bosses and colleagues. I have sent a few private apologies. If you feel you're due one, let me know!

To Sum Up

I'm sure there's something daft / dodgy / dangerous that I've Tweeted at some point. We all screw up occasionally. But I'm confident there's no pattern of weird and horrible behaviour on my part.

Reading back my old reflections has been (mostly) fun - it's great to wallow in nostalgia, eh?