Just to paint you a picture in case you haven't been there to witness, this is what 2020 Twitter was like.
Don't say anything against the established rules. What are the rules? Delete yourself if you don't know them. Don't be assertive, sarcastic, outspoken, sad, happy, pensive, decisive. Whatever you say, you're wrong. Whatever you don't say, you're also wrong. Whatever you think, you're a monster; whatever you didn't think about, you should have. If you didn't, you're a monster. Anything you say can and will be used to ruin you.
I had a very popular account in that time, but I was also an undiagnosed bipolar 2 (not seeking help for that here; it's under control), so I said a lot of weird shit. Or did I say it because I'm inherently a bad person? I can't get their hate tweets out of my head. I can't get their hate tweets about others out of my head. For good 8 months, I was being dragged on there, to hell and back. Whenever I tried to apologise, especially when I would come down and realize I fucked up, it was met with such vengeance that at one point, I just genuinely didn't know how to continue living with this.
Now I'm off Twitter for good 3 years, but my social skills are completely in the gutter. I don't know how to speak. What to say. I'm trying to constantly predict what the other person is thinking, or what their beliefs are, just so they don't get mad at me. I've also isolated myself for several years before and after 2020 because, well, there was a mental health decline that I could feel in times when things cleared up; so that isolation didn't help with my social skills at all. But now I'm just so terrified that I cramp up whenever I start talking to anyone. I force myself to be like shiny and happy and jumpy, but it's not authentic, and an exhausting act to maintain, and I don't know how to be that happy-go-lucky person. If I turn it down and just live, I constantly feel like I said something off-putting, something that doesn't fit into the demand for conversations to be frill and everyone always agreeing on everything. Or at least this is the view that my years on Twitter gave me, and I can't get rid of it.
I don't know how to talk to people when it seems everything you can say will get you shot on sight. And I don't want to risk checking if my twitter-influenced view is actually correct. I'm kind of stuck here.