To be clear, it’s not brave to quit Twitter, or righteous (I’m still on Facebook, which is just a differently shaped moral stockyard), or noteworthy. Quitting Twitter is just a thing that you can do. I mention it only because there was a time when I didn’t think it was a thing that I could do, and then I did it, and now my life is better.

I’m frequently approached by colleagues, usually women, who ask me about quitting Twitter with hushed titillation, as if I’ve escaped a cult or broken a particularly seductive taboo. Well, here’s what my new life is like: I don’t wake up with a pit in my stomach every day, dreading what horrors accrued in my phone overnight. I don’t get dragged into protracted, bad-faith arguments with teenage boys about whether poor people deserve medical care, or whether putting nice guys in the friend zone is a hate crime. I don’t spend hours every week blocking and reporting trolls and screen-grabbing abuse in case it someday escalates into a credible threat. I no longer feel like my brain is trapped in a centrifuge filled with swastikas and Alex Jones’s spittle. Time is finite, and now I have more of it.

At the same time, I know this conversation is more complicated than that. I’ve lost a large platform to self-promote and make professional connections, which isn’t something many writers can afford to give up (less established writers and marginalized writers most of all — in a horrid irony, the same writers disproportionately abused on Twitter). I get my news on a slight delay. I seethe at the perception that I ceded any ground to trolls trying to push me out. I will probably never persuade RuPaul to be my friend. Also, I loved Twitter. Twitter is funny and smart and validating and cathartic. It feels, when you are embroiled in it, like the place where everything is happening. (Scoff if you like, but the president of the United States makes major policy announcements there. This is the world now.)

I shouldn’t have had to walk away from all that because for Twitter to take a firm stance against neo-Nazism might have cost it some incalculable sliver of profit. No one should. Sure, as in everything, global culture change would have been better. But I didn’t have global culture change, and I’m better equipped to fight for global culture change now that I’m not locked in eternal whack-a-mole with a sea of angry boy-men, an unknown percentage of which are probably robots.

When you deactivate a verified Twitter account (nail-polish emoji), you have one year to log back in or your account — everything you ever tweeted, every reply in every thread — is permanently deleted. I always planned to log in and then immediately deactivate again, to re-up for another year. I figured I’d eventually reactivate, even if just for posterity. I was part of some important cultural conversations; I said some smart things before other people said them; I made some good jokes. One time the actor Michael McKean called me “doodlebug” in an affectionate manner because he liked one of my movie reviews. I wouldn’t mind preserving that.

Last week I realized: I was late. I’d forgotten to log back in. A year had passed. It’s all gone. It’s like I was halfway through a difficult column and asked a thief to watch my laptop while I peed. It’s like a great wind came and blew my problem novel into the river. It’s like I ate a very good sandwich without taking a picture of it. Sometimes it is O.K. to just remember things.