It started June 25, 2008: “Testing, testing. Is this thing on?” My first tweet. I began by trying to make a few friends laugh. I had no idea how quickly tweeting would consume me. Before long I was posting 20 to 30 times a day, seven days a week. Some of my posts were funny, some sad, some vaguely existential — “Living happily ever after is killing me” — some flirty, some filthy. I posted daily for three years with only one exception — the day my father-in-law died. Eventually, I attracted about 25,000 followers. Not bad for a noncelebrity.

Soon my entire life revolved around tweeting. I stopped reading, rarely listened to music or watched TV. When I was out with friends, I would duck into the bathroom with my iPhone. I tweeted while driving, between sets of tennis, even at the movies. (“I love holding your hand in the dark.”) When I wasn’t on Twitter, I would compose faux aphorisms that I might use later. I began to talk that way too. I sounded like a cross between a Barbara Kruger installation and a fortune cookie. I posted every hour on the hour, day and night, using a Web site that enabled me to tweet while asleep.

It was an obsession. And like most obsessions, no good came of it.

Eight months after I began tweeting, I was laid off from a job in the music business. Looking for work in such a bad economy was brutal. Almost a year went by before I finally landed a job at a men’s magazine. Just before I started, I removed my name from my Twitter feed and replaced it with my initials, L.C.

One morning, a few months later, my boss came into my office. “We need to talk about your Twitter,” he said.