Two years after Jack Dorsey and his buddies launched Twitter in 2006, I reluctantly joined the site.

We were encouraged to start tweeting by a former editor who saw the microblogging social media app as a way to reach new audiences. At first, it seemed odd to share fleeting thoughts and observations with strangers. But journalists, politicians and activists from around the world started showing up. They attracted more people who wanted to learn and share interesting things. It was a text-based site, so it drew the word nerds and news junkies.

These were my people.

I started spending big cultural moments -- sports championships, annual awards ceremonies and breaking news events -- with the Twitter community.

Logging into Twitter felt like stopping by a witty cocktail party. The site became the first thing I looked at in the morning to see what was trending and the last thing I looked at before going to bed. I discovered story ideas and found sources on it. Over the course of 16 years, posting on it became a daily habit -- even when the party wasn’t as entertaining anymore. Trolls and bots and propagandists infiltrated, and the rhetoric turned uglier.

In 2022, billionaire Elon Musk bought Twitter for $44 billion.

I worried that it was the beginning of the end for the one social media site that felt indispensable. I naively hoped Musk’s desire to protect his financial interests would prevent him from ruining the place. Dorsey even tweeted that Musk was the “singular solution I trust” to fix Twitter.

I was wrong, and so was Dorsey.

Musk’s decisions degraded the reliability of information on the site, and it became rampant with hate speech and far-right trolls. Still, I kept my account on his rebranded X. I had curated a list of 1,000 people I followed and had more than 25,000 followers -- not a massive platform, but a well-connected one.

But I started looking for a new place for online conversations.

The easiest way to break a bad habit is to replace it with a better one. When an open-source social media site, Bluesky, also started by Dorsey, began gaining traction, I decided to check it out. People there were posting about issues in a thoughtful way and sharing news links I wanted to read.

My interest in checking X dropped to glancing at it once a week or so. I felt less agitated first thing in the morning and slept better at night. I was finally implementing a change in my own life that I had preached to my children for all of theirs: Spend less time looking at screens and more time in the real world.

Dorsey left the board of Bluesky and described X as “freedom technology.”

It doesn’t look like freedom to support a king.

The past few weeks have changed the way I view participation on X.

Musk, the world’s richest man and a private citizen, has amassed an unprecedented amount of power in the federal government. None of us ever voted for Musk, who grew up in a wealthy family in apartheid South Africa, for any elected office. But he’s now acting as America’s co-president, with access to all our information in the U.S. Treasury and the ability to shut down congressionally appropriated programs like USAID, scrub government websites of public data and dismiss civil servants without cause.

Musk, a “special government employee” who could become the world’s first trillionaire by 2027, directly benefits from billions in contracts with the U.S. government. (Those contracts are paid by our tax dollars.)

Musk wanted Twitter for its ability to influence. He’s gotten more than his money’s worth.

I finally requested and downloaded an archive of my data from X. I’m using Cyd, a free desktop app, to delete more than 26,000 old tweets. I’ve made my account private. I might occasionally retweet posts that I think should be amplified, but I have no desire to post on the site of a billionaire who is tearing apart our country and its Constitution while growing his fortune with our tax dollars.

For nearly 17 years, I created free content for a company whose owners have made billions from our personal information, thoughts and analysis.

Leaving it behind was easier than I expected.

Frankie was racing down the small hill in the backyard when he yelped and lifted his hind leg close to his body.

The first time my 16-pound cotton ball of a pup yipped in pain and started limping, I rushed him to the vet. It turned out he has a luxating patella -- basically a trick knee.

I learned to pop his knee back into place when it slips out of the socket and give him an anti-inflammatory pill. Normally, he would be back to his goofy self in a couple of hours.

This time, Frankie didn’t bounce back.

I carried him around until it was time for his appointment. The vet held Frankie’s chicken-bone sized joint between his fingers and showed me how his tibia slid forward in a way it shouldn’t. Frankie had torn his cranial cruciate ligament (CCL), which connects the thigh bone to the shin bone -- the equivalent of the ACL in humans. It’s a fairly common injury in active dogs and certain breeds.

The vet said the knee could eventually recover on its own, but dogs typically had better long-term outcomes if they got a surgical repair. This knee surgery can cost anywhere from $2,500 to $5,000.

Given that I had spent my entire childhood uninsured, I never got insurance for Frankie. It seemed like a peculiar luxury to purchase health insurance for a dog when 26 million Americans are uninsured.

Maybe that was a bad decision.

Just like Frankie’s ligament, I was also torn. I didn’t want to subject him to an unnecessary surgery, not to mention a recovery that required weeks of inactivity. The operation's cost was also a concern: We are still paying for two children in college. But I also didn’t want him to develop painful arthritis or bone spurs later in life.

He was 6 at the time, and could live another decade.

I told the vet I would think it over.

Frankie is a Coton du Tulear, so I asked other owners of Cotons in a Facebook group if they had opted for surgery after a similar injury. Half of those who responded advised getting the surgery; the other half said to let it heal on its own. When I asked my dog-owning friends, half of them said their dogs had also torn their knee ligaments.

The CCL repair is the most common orthopedic surgery for dogs -- partly because dogs are living longer than in the past and partly because more pet owners have insurance, or are willing to pay for the surgery.

Frankie is my first dog, and I’ve already spent way more on him than I could have ever imagined spending on an animal -- from grooming to boarding to day camp to training to an endless supply of treats and toys.

For the next month, I tried every home remedy mentioned on Al Gore’s internet. I fed Frankie homemade bone broth and fresh chicken at each meal. I gave him glucosamine supplements. I used red light therapy on his knee. I massaged his limbs and carried him everywhere.

He was not averse to any of this. He was able to walk without pain, although his gait looked a little off. But during one of our short walks, I heard a clicking coming from his knee. Probably a meniscus tear, the internet informed me.

I called and scheduled Frankie’s surgery.

I was a wreck the day of the procedure. Afterward, the vet’s staff assured me it went well and sent me home with pages of post-surgical care notes. Frankie was groggy and whined in pain later that evening.

Maybe I had made a big mistake.

Friends assured me that the first week of recovery was the worst. Their dogs got substantially better week by week. I continued to pamper Frankie.

He watched DogTV videos on YouTube. I bought baby gates to contain him to a single room downstairs, and enrichment toys to keep his brain occupied.

I could never have anticipated how much attention and nurturing I could devote to a pet. To be honest, Frankie acts a lot more like a toddler than a dog. In a parallel universe -- where day care and college didn’t cost so much -- I’m sure we would have had more children. Instead, Frankie, who has no post-graduate plans, is my third child.

It’s been three months since he tore his knee. He’s running around the backyard again. He can hop up on the couch. I’ve kept up with his joint supplements, the fresh boiled chicken on top of his kibble and gentle stretching exercises in the morning.

Occasionally, I can still hear his knee click when we go for a walk, so I still wonder if the surgery will be worth it for him in the long run.

But knowing that I’ve done everything I can for him is absolutely worth it.

Karen Clark came home from work to take a quick nap. She set an alarm to avoid oversleeping.

The beeping that woke her up was the smoke alarm. When she opened her eyes, the bedroom was full of smoke. Instinctively, she ran downstairs and out the front door.

It was the dead of winter -- February of 1988 -- when she ran barefoot to a neighbor’s house and screamed for them to call 911. Within a few minutes, she heard sirens in the distance.

She stood outside watching the flames engulf her home.

“It felt like forever,” she said. She had recently begun working as a Mary Kay consultant. In the era before widespread computer use, all her records were on paper.

“My business is gone,” she remembers thinking.

For most of her career, she had worked as an insurance claims adjuster, having visited multiple fire claim sites. Now, she was on the other side -- a survivor of a catastrophic fire that destroyed her home and nearly all its contents. She had had the foresight to use a camcorder to make a video of each of the rooms in her house, but that tape was never stored in a fireproof safe. It melted in the fire.

The cause of the fire was either an incubator for her pet parakeet, Teddy, who perished that day, or a nearby lamp. When she walked into her home after the fire was extinguished, she couldn’t recognize it. The family room was in ashes -- blobs of plastic where a phone used to be, remnants of her life under her feet.

Clark, now 71, moved back in with her parents while her home was rebuilt. Like anyone else who files an insurance claim, she had to create lists of all her belongings. Other survivors describe the difficulty of trying to recall every single possession inside a home, when each item was purchased and the cost, especially while still trying to process the shock from such a devastating event.

“As an adjuster, you’re having people make lists,” Clark said. “But as a victim, they’re not just lists. You can’t put a dollar amount on memories.”

She realized she was underinsured on the contents of her home. It was impossible to remember everything in every room, along with the irreplaceable heirlooms and mementos.

This December, Clark was driving around, doing some Christmas shopping, when she spotted smoke. She pulled over as soon as she heard the sirens. Clark sat in her car and bawled.

Nearly 37 years later, the feelings from that February day hit her hard.

Other survivors of natural disasters describe similar emotions watching the coverage of the fires raging in L.A. that have killed at least 27 people and destroyed thousands of structures. More than 88,000 residents are still under evacuation orders.

So many of the victims in L.A. lost more than their homes. When entire communities are destroyed, all those systems of support -- family members, churches, community centers -- are also lost.

“My church came over and helped me. My neighbors rallied around me. I still had support and help,” Clark said of her long-ago fire. She remembers vividly the ways people showed up for her: Her mom found wet documents in her former office and hung them on a clothesline, so Clark would have some way to file her taxes. Her neighbor brought boots and a coat and physically put them on her while Clark stood outside that winter day. Her brother took photos of burned-out rooms to help her create the lists of possessions.

Clark wonders how many of the recent victims lacked insurance and have no way to recover their losses. How many have also lost jobs because the businesses where they worked burned down?

“I don’t know how these communities will even rebuild,” she said. It infuriates her to see comments that minimize the losses people have suffered. Yes, people are lucky to be alive and yes, it’s a blessing to have insurance, but there is still grief and mourning for things that can’t be replaced.

She is donating to relief efforts and encouraging others to help. Natural disasters bring people together because they force us to contemplate how vulnerable we all are.

Suffering her own losses deepened Clark’s empathy.

But you shouldn't have to walk through a fire to feel others’ pain.

TAP-IN -- Trauma Assistance Program-International -- is offering anyone impacted by the fires in California five free therapy sessions with licensed mental health professionals who are trained in trauma first aid and stabilization for ongoing traumatic events. They have clinicians who can treat children and adults. To learn how to access sessions, visit traumaassistanceprogram-international.org.