I've been on Twitter for almost half of my life. Even though it's rotting my brain, I'll never give it up.

• Twitter was publicly launched on July 15, 2006.
• I joined around three years later in March 2009. I was 13.
• I've spent half my life on Twitter so, while I'm well aware of its dark sides, I can't give it up.

Twitter turned 15 this year, after going live for the first time on March 21, 2006. It was launched to the public almost four months later, on July 15, 2006. It took me almost three years to join, but I found my way there on March 19, 2009. At the time, I was 13 years old, an eighth grader living in suburban Long Island, New York.

One of my first tweets has since been lost to the ether of the internet, but it was something like, "Waiting to get addicted to Twitter ..." Little did I know, within a few months, I would be constantly (and aimlessly) scrolling through my feed.

Instead, my earliest surviving tweet, which I made in November 2010, is a quote from "The Hangover."

Don't judge me - I had just turned 15 and was a sophomore in high school.

Twitter has been a daily fixture in my life since 8th grade

Twitter has been different things to me over the last 12 years. At first, it was just another outlet for a stream of consciousness, like Facebook statuses used to be. It became a place to share inside jokes or to perfect the art of a subtweet - a tweet about someone without actually naming them.

During high school, before the rise of iPhones, you'd have to text "40404" to get your tweets up. You could also choose to get certain people's tweets texted to you, and it became a test to see who had subscribed to get your tweets texted to them.

The texting mechanism, perhaps unsurprisingly, caused a few issues for my classmates. When someone accidentally tweeted what was meant to be a private mean text about someone who followed them, it led to a very public and uncomfortable Twitter exchange between the pair.

Figuring out who was subtweeting whom became a pastime of everyone in school, like cracking a code. It led to fights, relationship problems, and groups of friends airing their dirty laundry on the internet for the whole school to see - and I followed along with all of it, just like I followed along with celebrity drama in tabloids.

Scrolling through tweets from high school essentially presents a time capsule. I can track when I started watching "Friends" ...

... when I became obsessed with One Direction ...

... or when I moved to New Orleans for college.

By the time I got there, I was tweeting multiple times a day. My group of friends even had our own shared account that only followed us, so we could get a streamlined timeline (the Close Friends feed on Instagram of its time).

More than Facebook or Tumblr or Formspring or Vine or TikTok, Twitter takes me back. Reading my tweets from a specific time in my life, I remember exactly what I was doing, where I was, and who I was with. My high school and college experiences, and who I was at the time, are forever intertwined with Twitter.

As I moved into adulthood, I saw the darker sides of Twitter

I no longer only use Twitter to keep up with friends. Now, I use it to connect with co-workers, comedians, podcast hosts, potential interview subjects, or even celebrities. It's become a place where I find most of my news (or least a place to start) which, as we've learned, can be dangerous.

It's shown me some of the darkest parts of the internet, and while I go to there laugh, I also go there to doomscroll - the peculiar term for endlessly scrolling my feed during a negative news event to simultaneously find solidarity with other people by complaining or voicing anxiety, like during the Capitol insurrection in January 2021. It was almost impossible to look away from my feed for the week after, even if I tried - and I tried.

Since as far back as 2017, in fact, I've been complaining about Twitter and the toxic environment it fostered.

At this point, I feel like I turn to Twitter for the good and the bad: Twitter validates my existential dread while also serving me jokes about bean dads and 30 to 50 feral hogs. While I could probably work on the doomscrolling, Twitter still makes me laugh out loud with its inside jokes and memes. Watching (and live-tweeting) shows like "The Bachelor," "Game of Thrones," and "Stranger Things" have led to some of my fondest memories on the internet.

There's been much written about the end of the monoculture, but having a community on Twitter that shares my interests and sense of humor helps the world feel a bit smaller and more connected - even if it's not always the healthiest place to be.

After nearly 12 years, I thought my relationship with the little blue bird had finally stabilized

That is, until I woke up one morning to find out I had been verified due to my job at Insider. I thought about the 13-year-old me who had joined Twitter while dreaming about becoming the next Ryan Seacrest. She never, ever, would've thought I actually would get a job in media or get one of the coveted blue checks.

But the feeling was bittersweet. While teenage Gabbi would've been elated, 25-year-old Gabbi has mixed feelings. Amnesty called Twitter a "toxic place for women" and anti-Semitism is on the rise in this country, especially on the internet. When you're verified on Twitter or Instagram, you're vulnerable to more hate.

I haven't received anything too damaging yet, but I think more about what I tweet, taking an extra second to play out what trolls could say. As a journalist, I have more responsibility than I did in high school tweeting about how annoying my math teacher is, or as a college student complaining about failing multiple practice microeconomics finals.

I don't think I'll ever be able to leave Twitter behind

I've spent almost half of my life on Twitter. I've texted my tweets, tweeted from countless laptops, the Blackberry and iPhone Twitter apps, and even tried out UberTwitter, may it rest in peace.

Twitter has stressed me out, but my brain's been trained to think in 140 characters (I'll never be used to 280), and at this point, it's a reflex to wake up and check the app.

So, while I'm still getting used to this new landscape, and I'll still constantly complain that this app has been rotting my brain, I don't think I'll ever be able to shake it.

Or as I'd say on Twitter: I'll never be free of this hell site.