I think I’ve learned something similar through the discussion around everything happening at Twitter this year. Social media platforms think that they own the intimate relationships between people, simply because they are able to transmit and collect the data of that relationship.

I’m a millennial who experienced the transformation of what human socialization was before MySpace and what it was after it. I’ve known digitally mediated relationships since I was in early in my social development, all the way back to middle school twenty some years ago.

The ubiquity of what it’s become made it hard to see, because I’ve never really known life without this technology. It took a while to teach myself no one except me owns any data about myself; my marriage to my husband and partner of 13 years, or access to my social network and resources. That very fact is what makes me and my queer family innately valuable and powerful.

I’ve realized that I don’t need to a accept a life that requires I continually come out at as gay to the world, because I’m capable of creating a world where I decide whom to let in.

At the end of the day, I’ve learned that social media can’t exist without me, and I get to tell it what I need it for —

NOT the other way around, no matter what they say.