Chrissy Teigen caves, returns to Twitter after 3-week break

Chrissy Teigen smiling in a ruffled orange dress

April 16, 2021 10:58 AM PT

Chrissy Teigen couldn’t take it anymore: She is back on Twitter.

“turns out it feels TERRIBLE to silence yourself and also no longer enjoy belly chuckles randomly throughout the day and also lose like 2000 friends at once lol,” the mother of two and former model tweeted Friday morning.

“I choose to take the bad with the good!!,” she added.

Teigen, a cookbook author and prolific social media presence, bailed on the platform March 24, telling her more than 13 million followers at the time that the toxic environment on Twitter had taken a toll on her mental health.

Teigen said in a Twitter thread before her late March departure that she felt too much pain when she didn’t make people happy online and that the positives no longer outweighed the negatives. She said that during her time on the site she’d never learned to block out the negativity, even though for a decade she had considered many followers to be “actual friends.”

“My desire to be liked and fear of pissing people off has made me somebody you didn’t sign up for, and a different human than I started out here as! Live well, tweeters. Please know all I ever cared about was you!!!,” she wrote. “I encourage you to know and never forget that your words matter. No matter what you see, what that person portrays, or your intention. For years I have taken so many small, 2-follower count punches that at this point, I am honestly deeply bruised.”

Then she moved to Instagram to explain further, saying it wasn’t Twitter’s fault and that the company had worked a lot with her and her team in the more than 10 years she’s been tweeting as @chrissyteigen. She’s been especially candid on the platform, sharing intimate details about her family life with musician husband John Legend.

“It’s not the platform. It’s not the ‘bullying’. And it’s not the trolls,” she wrote on Instagram. “The trolls I can deal with, although it weighs on you. It’s just me. I have to come to terms with the fact some people aren’t gonna like me. I hate letting people down or upsetting people and I feel like I just did it over and over and over. Someone can’t read that they disappointed you in some way every single day, all day without physically absorbing that energy. I can feel it in my bones.

“And to the Q anon people who think I’m in Guantanamo Bay right now, lol,” she added. “I saw ‘Q: into the storm’ and saw what I’m working with here. And I, lol, I no longer care. Don’t flatter yourselves.”

But Teigen, who also has been rebounding from a September miscarriage and getting sober, seemed to be in a better mood Friday after her three-week break. “I’ve spent weeks just saying tweets to shampoo bottles” she tweeted in response to a person who asked what she had been up to.

Though Teigen’s quick humor and expert comeback game earned her millions of Twitter fans, she also drew plenty of haters, who often mocked her for her fame and her lifestyle. This wasn’t the first time she was driven to shift her social-media focus.

The “Cravings” author left the service in 2014 after a comment she made about a shooting in Canada’s Parliament building was misunderstood.

“active shooting in Canada, or as we call it in america, wednesday. That’s not a joke. It is a fact,” the she had opined Oct. 22, 2014, while events were still unfolding. Many people thought the tweet, rather than being anti-shooting, was anti-Canadian.

“I’m not apologizing. If you take it wrong, that is your fault,” she tweeted defiantly back then. “For some reason, Canadians think I am saying they have a lot of shootings. I am not saying that. Sigh.”

About two hours after she first weighed in on the shooting, she noted that it had “been a while since I inadvertently pissed a ton of people off. Forgot how much it sucks.” The next day, she tweeted, “I feel sick. Bye Twitter” and declared she was moving to Instagram.

A week later, she was back.

Times staff writer Christi Carras contributed to this report.