"Can I write about this?": navigating cancellation anxiety, rejection sensitivity, and Twitter pile-on phobia as you write your book on that sensitive subject

The short answer is yes, you can. What you *can't* do is control other people's feelings and reactions. Here's how I recommend navigating this reality.

The answer to The Cancel Culture Question is pretty simple, at least on the surface.

Another submission I got for the Q and A the other week was a version of what I like to call The Cancel Culture Question.

“What’s the new puritanism in literature?” the asker asked. “What can you NOT do….how far can you truly go these days?”

In a superficial sense, the answer to this is simple. I’m sure you’ve read a version of it already: If you live in America in 2022, you can write about whatever you like and express whatever controversial opinions you want. What you can’t do is control how others feel, react to, amplify, or discuss your writing, including colleagues in the publishing industry. You also can’t control how they spend their money.

TA DA! Question answered.

Ahahahahahaha just kidding. There is obviously more going on with The Cancel Culture Question than a request for helpful con law facts or even publishing advice. The question taps into many of us creative types’ deepest foundational fears and worries—big feelings I help my colleagues parse (and vice versa) nearly every day.

In my experience, authors who ask The Cancel Culture Question are not asking for information so much as reassurance.

Some ask it from a place of self-loathing; others don’t really ask it so much as try to drown out their fear with shouty, defensive self-justification.

Nevertheless—and this might be Pollyannaish of me—I believe that however obnoxiously encased, the question comes from the same small, scared, vulnerable place deep inside all people. It’s a way of saying: “I am scared I have no value.” And: “I am afraid of not belonging.” And: “please, please love me.” And: “tell me I’m safe.”

Acknowledgement, love, and belonging are elemental human desires. Not just desires—needs. Our impulse to meet these needs—and our terror of their not being met—have been with all of us since birth. And I would venture to say that most of us are rather imprecise about meeting these needs in consistently healthy ways.

For anyone whose life has immunocompromised their self-esteem, book publishing—a well full of that acknowledgement, love, and belonging we all need no less than water, yet contaminated beyond belief with the cholera of narcissism—tastes both compelling and dreadful. Every sip makes one simultaneously think I’m saved! and I’m going to die. One might process the latter as fear, dread, obsessive fixation, people-pleasing, irritation, rage—any number of things. But that’s what it is: existential, annihilating dread.

That’s what’s really going on, IMO, when we ask what we “can” and “can’t” say in our books these days: we’re trying to figure out the line of where our safety ends and our personal annihilation begins.

The landscape in 2022? Not very reassuring.

There is SO much pain, trauma, anger, shame, and above all change surfacing in the zeitgeist right now. Much of it is overdue and for the long-term good. One hopes, for instance, that amidst all this cancel culture handwringing, a tiny fraction of the privileged population might realize that this is all an extremely diluted version of the literal murder culture America’s marginalized people have been subjected to for centuries. Maybe more and more of us will move into a place of empathy and solidarity and stay there in the long term? :nervous chuckle: I hope!

Yes, and. Much of all the pain, trauma, anger, shame, etc. floating around is just plain bad: gross, destructive, ethically pointless. Maybe it’s transformative, but transformative in the way breaking a bone and re-setting it in some other position is transformative. Like…oh God. Ow.

So many people are moving through their daily routines feeling disoriented, isolated, thin-skinned—and above all, triggered. We’re all on high alert, facing the prospect of all kinds of loss and rejection. Thus we are nearly all encountering the paradox of the human fight-or-flight response, which simultaneously makes one feel invisible—even obsolete—and somehow also one blunder away from ruin at the hands of an all-seeing, all-seething mob who cares very much about our every move.

This is a wretched feeling to feel. It is especially so if you happened to grow up around caregivers and mentors who were fixated on you as an archetype (some identity, role, or reputation they expected you to embody) and completely uninterested in you as a person.

I imagine that those of you who experienced that kind of caregiving feel especially frightened and dreadful by the specter of cancellation right now; it’s traumatizing and retraumatizing all the way down to the core of who you are. Your trauma has left you with a deep, unmet need for affirmation and loving regard. And this is, I would venture to guess, the overall least likely time in modern history for any person to find these things in the wild.

None of this is answers the poor author’s question, Anna. OMG. Can’t you just tell us what we should and shouldn’t write about in 2022?

Yes. Before I did so, though, I wanted to pause at length and establish that the deep, scary feelings behind The Cancel Culture Question are real, valid, and safe here. I wanted to get down to the eye level of our inner children and say: I know. I know. It is hard, hard, hard to be a person.

Anyway. Onto the actual advice.