I started my Twitter account back in 2009 and at the time I wasn’t quite sure what to do with it. There was a very strict character limit and I’m known for being…wordy. It occurred to me that I could do something fun with this if I only tweeted in Haikus. I had learned about that form of poetry in school and liked the concise nature of it – the syllable limit seemed a good fit for the character limit.
The challenge would be to share a story or idea and compress it down to the barest limit and still make it clear what I was trying to say.
And I would only tweet in haikus – nothing else. I did a few here and there – some that I’m really proud of – but not with any regularity.
A few years ago I decided to really challenge myself as a writer. I would write a haiku and post it on twitter every single day.
And so I did.
Some days it was difficult to come up with something unique to talk about. Other times the story I tried to tell was too big and it was difficult to compress. But, every day I did a haiku.
I didn’t have many twitter followers but I found a way to automatically cross-post these to Facebook. So, in and among my regular posts, my little snippets of poetry started to appear.
And people liked them. I started to get comments and likes from my friends and some people would write their own haikus back in response.
It was really rewarding to be able to share, even to my small circle of friends. And a good intellectual challenge to assess my day and find something to talk about.
Facebook changed the rules at some point and my cross-posting became manual. Irksome, but not the end of the world. And all the while, my archive on twitter continued to grow.
I wrote haikus to mark the occasional milestone or important event. And when I hit 1500 tweets, I decided to export them. I used the twitter tools and requested a file and it was ready for download the next day. I tucked away the zip file and kept on tweeting.
When the pandemic hit it got harder to write. I didn’t go anywhere or do anything and I was working from home. But I kept on writing every day – sharing my hopes and struggles.
My twitter account continued to grow, but then recently the company was bought by a lunatic and things started to fail. I kept an eye on the social media about the social media platform and got worried about my archive. I had those 1500 tucked away, but had written almost 200 more since then. If the platform failed, I would lose those.
I was within a few haikus of another milestone and early this week I wrote enough to bring me up to 1700. I posted those on twitter and requested a new archive – hoping that the archive system wouldn’t fail before it was processed.
As the days passed I kept checking to see if the archive would finish and manually posted the “pre-tweets” to facebook.
Yesterday, I decided I couldn’t trust that the archive would work at all. I went to my twitter account and started to copy|paste out the tweets – scrolling through the past to find them.
But, it only let me go back so far. And when I looked back at the archive in the zip file, I was missing several months in 2020. I saved what I could to a document, then headed to facebook.
I started scrolling back to find those missing months – not looking forward to picking out the tweets from the rest of the posts – but I could only go back to mid 2021 before the page would fail and force a reload.
It was looking like I would lose some of my poetry, but then I remembered that facebook too has an export feature. I found that, limited it to just my posts, and set a date range to slightly overlap my twitter zip file archive.
It was processed in a few minutes and I downloaded a file. And it was exactly what I needed.
With a literal sigh of relief, I turned my attention to a new long-term online archive where I could preserve what I had downloaded – as well as my future haikus.
And then this morning, I got an email that my twitter archive of 1700 tweets was ready to download.
Sigh.
I’m not a sentimental person, but this one really bothered me. I guess it was a difference between deciding to toss or delete something – on my terms and for my reasons – versus losing it because of someone else’s actions.
And I know this is a bit silly. Just a pile of very small poems with a lot of careful counting – doesn’t mean much in the grand scheme of things, but it mattered to me.
I’ll back up the archive to my google drive and keep this on my new computer as well. And I’ll still keep tweeting on Twitter and posting to facebook – but I’m going to add an extra step and save them locally as well. Just in case.
If twitter survives the lunatic, I may pull another archive a hundred Haikus from now.
I still have more stories to tell, after all.