I also suffer from crippling anxiety. It has stiffled my educational and professional programming career.

At the end of 2017 I had a severe anxiety attack and I closed my account (amoung other things).

Over the years I stalked twitter-search for my industry news fix.

Eventually I got my anxiety under control and registered for a new handle, to get back to my connections, but it was taken. It has been taken for over a year and is inactive.

Twitter's own policy states:

To keep your account active, be sure to log in and Tweet at least every 6 months. Accounts may be permanently removed due to prolonged inactivity.[1]

I made another handle on a different email address but i feel like a fraud using another handle like that. It feels off since all my other accounts and my website use the old handle.

One ray of hope is that twitter was said to wipe inactive accounts [2] but I don't know when this will happen.

Should I reach out to this inactive account and ask for it if they are no longer using it?

[1] - https://help.twitter.com/en/rules-and-policies/inactive-twitter-accounts [2] - https://www.theverge.com/2019/11/27/20986084/twitter-inactive-accounts-usernames-memorialize-deceased-users-not-removing