If you follow me, you’ll know that even though I haven’t been writing a lot over here, I have been very active since April 2021 on an app called TikTok.

I started out as NeurodivergentGranny and eventually evolved into GrandyMarty before TikTok shuttered tonight.

I feel like I have lost so many connections. Twenty-seven thousand people followed me at the end. I can’t even fathom that many people in person. I had over eight thousand mutuals.

I called them friends.

For almost four years, I wrote, recorded, edited and published multiple videos every week. Sometimes, multiple videos per day.

With those videos, I shared my grief over losing my abilities when I was floxed, the joy and relief I felt when I recieved my diagnoses of Ehlers-Danlos Syndrome and autism and OCD, and I shared my journey of discovering my gender and how I wanted to express myself.

I connected with people who cried with me, who laughed with (and at) me, and who understood what waking up with my body on fire can feel like.

I built a community and joined many others. The people who became my mutuals were closer to me, emotionally, than my blood family.

We learned about ARFID and MCAS together. We shared studies when any of us saw a new one drop.

We feared becoming homeless together during this housing crisis, and my online friends followed and shared my joy as I acquired housing after a 14-year wait and found a lovely apartment where I could roll into the bathroom.

But free speech is now dead, and my friends are scattered amongst apps whose algorithms couldn’t compete, so they attacked the competition with cash. Cash spent buying the United States Republican Party.

Don’t be fooled. This is all a part of the oligarchy take over of the United States.

Only minutes before the ban would be enacted, cutting me off from accessing the creative content I had spent thousands of hours producing over the past three and a half years, I put my account on “private.”

I don’t know what that setting will do or if it will protect my intellectual property at all, but it was done.

I also learned during the same few minutes that my VPN set in Canada did not make any difference. It wasn’t based on my current location but the location of my account when I first signed up.

How does it feel to have thousands of people who were my audience stripped away from me? Like I have been robbed. These were my friends. How dare they?

I don’t feel like freedom of speech is something that is protected at all in this country anymore. I don’t know if it truly ever was.

I’m scared about the direction that this country and this world is going in. I fear for the lives and health of my grandchildren and friends everywhere.