Clean Slate
UPDATE: I'm no longer on Twitter. You can now find me on Mastodon.
I’ve moved on Twitter from @luus to @mrsan3ssen, and here’s why:
Yesterday, Twitter decided to restore all the tweets I had previously deleted back onto my timeline. I was pissed AF. I bulk-deleted them all again, but I’m worried they might resurface at some point. So I decided to start fresh with a new account.
At first, I hesitated because my ego said, “You’re going to lose your ‘early adopter’ status. On your next Twitter anniversary, it’ll say 1 year instead of 14!” But so what? I’m not letting my ego run my life.
I also lost my old handle @luus. Apparently, Twitter changed its policy on the minimum length for usernames, which now has to be at least 5 characters (and I didn’t know that).
So first I renamed @luus to @luushasmoved, then tried to create a new account with my old username @luus. You can probably guess what happened: I got the error message, “Username too short, must be at least 5 characters.”
I almost cried. But shortly after, I felt this strange sense of relief because I was finally free of Luus.
My name is Lucia. That’s the name I grew up with. Even though my family calls me Lucie (my mum’s also named Lucia, so it helped tell us apart), I actually prefer Lulu, Lu, or Lucia.
That all changed one day when a colleague started calling me Luus. And before I knew it, everyone was calling me Luus. By everyone, I mean the Dutch folks. My Spanish family still calls me Lucie.
I think it’s because people find Luus easier to pronounce than Lucia. After years of only hearing Luus, I started introducing myself like, “Hi, my name is Lucia, but you can call me Luus.”
But honestly, I don’t really like Luus. It Dutchifies my Spanish roots.
So yes, starting over wasn’t such a bad idea after all.