Why did Angela Haggerty disappear from X?

“It’s good to see you around, Captain!” is a common response now any time I rear my head on X, as though I’ve recently recovered from a couple of broken legs and I’ve ventured round to the corner shop for a pint of milk.

It’s understandable. I’ve gone from being one of ScotPol’s most prolific tweeters over the last decade – not in the sense that I had particularly important things to say, more so that I just had an awful lot of things to say – to mostly being posted missing for the last year or two.

So what happened? And what’s life like on the other side of X?

Well, a lot happened, really. I had a baby in February 2020, just as a global pandemic was getting its shoes on, and then I experienced two major bereavements. My father died in June 2020 following a relatively short illness, and my son’s father died suddenly in October of the same year. To say this profoundly altered my world and the course of my life would be an understatement.

Ironically, X was a source of great support in the immediate aftermath of that time. There were a number of people I’ve never met and will likely never meet who were a regular source of joy and support. I still think fondly of them and I’m so grateful that they cared.

But as time went on, I spent less and less time on my ‘work’ social media. It gradually became a source of constant distress. The culture wars, the fighting, the trolling. I noticed a real dread in the pit of my stomach when I opened my X app. It eventually occurred to me that was absurd to persevere with something that was having a relentlessly negative effect on me. It was rarely positive.

My priorities had changed. My perspectives had changed. Everything felt amplified. Motherhood meant that beauty, joy and love had an intensity to it that I had never experienced before. But equally, inhumanity, cruelty and intolerance felt darker and more dangerous. I used to be able to shake a lot of that stuff on X, but not anymore. These things exist in the world, but the way in which we use our energy to deal with them is a choice we should think about carefully.

Followers of my journalistic work will know well that I’ve had some battles. As an Irish Catholic with a public profile in the media, I’ve been the target of some pretty brutal treatment from those who’d rather people like me were nowhere near respectable positions in society. This issue has a long historical context in Scotland and it always felt important to fight for my place, it felt like something bigger than just myself. (If you don’t know about it, Google has all the info.)

But the rest of it? So much of my time on X has been taken up with the most futile, idiotic, ridiculous arguments and fights over every little thing. People from all political walks of life have taken issue with me at some point – this is par for the course on X. It thrives on conflict. And I’ve taken issue with them, too. I cringe when I think of my own behaviour; the little swipes and digs I’ve taken at others, the sneering mockery I’ve displayed. My interactions were often dismissive, unproductive and lacking in any real thought or consideration for the people I was interacting with. I often projected an image of myself that was actually very unfair to myself. I have always sought unity, not division, in my life, so why was I indulging in behaviour to the contrary? I’ve reflected very seriously on that over time and while I can’t change it, I can move forward with a different mentality.

My experience over the course of the Covid-19 pandemic has led to me having very little interest left in arguing with people. Time can be spent doing better things. We can all contribute to the public discourse in thoughtful, firm and committed ways. Arguing aggressively with ‘the other side’ doesn’t make our positions any more valid.

X warps our views. It’s virtually impossible to invest a lot of time on the platform and not fall into echo chambers. Our perceptions of what people care about become dangerously skewed, and that really matters when journalists and politicians spend a lot of time on X.

I would guess that they hang around there for the same reasons I did: the fear that without it they will fall out of the loop. The thing is, it’s a loop well worth falling out of. Scottish political Twitter is a very small arena. It’s worth keeping a very occasional eye on, but that’s about it. While so many of us are worried about what we’ll miss on X, we are actually missing rather a lot in the real world.

We have given X an elevated status: those who use it intensely will likely argue that whether we like it or not, if politicians are using it as a platform of communication then it justifies us all spending a lot of time on it. I would counter argue that such substantial use of a social media platform is more in the realms of hobby and, for some, addiction, than they want to admit. It certainly was for me.

I am still very much around. I am still working and I’m still paying attention. It’s just my methods of communication that have changed. I prefer to stick to radio, television and writing, where I can give a proper account of myself and not become bogged down in misperceptions.

I know so many people no longer derive any pleasure at all from their presence on X and wish they could just quit. The lingering FOMO is what keeps them there.

But I can assure you, it’s do-able. It’s even wonderful. There is life on the other side of X. Real, beautiful, complicated life.