Comfort and care for when people viciously criticize you on the internet
Thoughts on this painful inevitability - yes, inevitability - of life as a published author.
There’s no right word to describe the worst feeling I know, so I’m going to make one up: “the BBs.” This is both an acronym for Big Bad Shame and a descriptor of what big, bad shame feels like, which is getting hit by BBs. A lot of BBs. An entire 1950s Boy Scout summer camp’s worth of BBs. All at once. And out of nowhere.
Crap on a CRACKER are the BBs painful. You open an innocuous-looking email, gasp at the cruel surprise inside—you’ve failed, you’re fired, you’re a liar—and POW: there go the volley of BBs, smacking and burning into your chest, fingers, wrists, and face. Or you meet your friend at a coffee shop for what you think is a casual hang, but the instant you make eye contact with her, you know there’s about to be a terrible confrontation.
“We need to talk,” she says. BAM: BBs, BBs everywhere, thwocking into your skull, your lungs, your throat. Yeah, it’s the worst.
What exactly triggers the BBs is different for everyone, but the general principle is this: they go off when some unanticipated (or under-anticipated) rejection validates your own worst fears about yourself. Someone you’re hoping will like you calls you a buffoon, a braggart, a pervert, a freak, a fraud, or just an all-around bad person. And on some deep, sickening level, you agree. Voila: you’ve taken a direct hit to the tenderest parts of your self-esteem.
On the whole, those of us in book publishing experience the BBs more often than most. Why? Oh, just think about it. We’re a bunch of sensitive, ruminative, high-achieving artistes who have made a career out of exposing our tender flesh to the general public. OF COURSE WE’RE GOING TO GET BEANED.
If you struggle with shame at all, ever, in any arena, you’re going to get BBed at some point in your publishing career.
It’s inevitable. Sorry.
It doesn’t matter what you’re writing about. You could literally be a beloved small-town librarian writing a children’s chapter book about teddy bears playing hopscotch. Someone, somewhere, is absolutely going to give that book a 1* review on Amazon and call you a greedy, no-talent bitch because the Kindle price is too high.
Alas, this is just the way of the world right now. There are just too many traumatized, disenfranchised, hurting, angry people who only feel visible when they’re lashing out. This was the case before the pandemic, for Christ’s sake. Now it’s the case on steroids.
Every week, I help at least one author or artist process a BBs attack, triggered by a cluster of 1* reviews, nasty emails, assholes yelling at book events, or a Twitter pile-on. And last week, the person I was holding as she howled was me! Because PSST, I get the BBs too. BADLY. Less frequently than I did when I was younger, but still more often than I’d prefer.
The first time I got BBed, I was 19. It was so agonizing that I made up my mind to spend the rest of my life avoiding a repeat, and yadda yadda, BBs avoidance is literally the entire reason I decided to become a literary agent. I became an agent because this career path struck me as the ideal way to participate in publishing while sidestepping the vulnerability and pain of being an author or corporate employee.
I love my job for many, many other reasons now. Which is good, because 19-year-old Anna was farcically wrong thinking she could avoid the BBs by becoming a literary agent or any kind of human adult with a life at all. Because here’s the truth: Other people do not fire the BBs at you; you fire the BBs at you. And you therefore cannot outrun or outmaneuver them. Womp womp.
The only “fix” for the BBs is long, slow, and internal. What you’ve got to do is coax that inner 1950s Boy Scout troupe away from the air rifle range of shame and along to the happy Arts and Crafts class of self care. Doing so is a long, annoying, messy, herding-cats kind of thing. And even if you’re largely successful at it, I guarantee you one asshole Boy Scout is going to refuse to leave the rifle range. Instead, he’ll stay there for the rest of your life and fire on you at random every so often, just because he’s a dick.
You’re always going to need to know how to prevent AND dress BB wounds. Until you die.
Tend to your BBs like you would any other injury.
If you’ve ever taken a first aid class, you have heard a nurse or EMT walk you through how this goes. You start by trying your best to prevent and protect you body so that metal projectiles don’t hurt you in the first place. Prevention and protection are important, but they also never going to be completely successful. So you also need to know how to dress your wounds and seek necessary help.
Prevention
Are you in therapy yet? Spoiler alert: I am a HUGE fan of therapy, especially psychodynamic therapy. It’s the single best thing you can do for yourself in a publishing career. If the cost of this newsletter is preventing you from getting a therapist, unsubscribe!!! What are you doing!!! Go get real help!
The BBs are ego wounds. Everyone has an ego, and having one that gets wounded from time to time does not make you pathetic, just human. Yes, and: feeling the pain of such wounds so acutely that you spin out for days—or in psych speak, “become dysregulated”—is a sign that your ego is not as flexible as it could be given some time, training, outside attention, and practice. This is what good therapists provide; they’re like personal trainers for the soul. You—yes, even you—can have a bendy, limber, emotionally healthy lil’ pretzel for a soul one day.
Explore various philosophies of reality acceptance: Buddhism, Stoicism, twelve-step recovery. Go deep into whichever of these traditions makes you feel most relieved, loved, seen, and held.
For me, that’s Tibetan Buddhism and everyone’s favorite Basic Suburban White Lady Canon of recovering alcoholics and eccentrics: Anne Lamott, Glennon Doyle, Pema Chödron. If you’re a parent, I also highly recommend my client Kristina Kuzmič’s Hold On But Don’t Hold Still. These women laugh with you, not at you, and they love themselves unconditionally. It’s medicine.
Care for yourself with the same whole-life hygiene you would offer a child you loved: restful sleep, three nutritious and delicious meals a day, structure, routine, hugs. This shit matters so much to self-esteem and mental health that it’s honestly a little embarrassing for me. How dare I be such an ordinary biological creature with predictable and simple needs! How dare something like whether I had protein at lunch have such an enormous impact on my coping ability!
Own the value of your own goddamn work. That is all.
Protection
If you have a Google Alert set up for your own name or book title, delete it immediately. I also suggest using blocker software to block your own Amazon retail and Goodreads pages. And if you know you’re not going to be able to resist searching your own name on Twitter, get off Twitter. Yes, really. NOW.
Oh, and also: don’t read the comments. Be best friends with the “mute” button on every social app.
It does not make you “safer” to know everything people are saying about you and you fucking know it, BARBARA. That’s like intentionally grabbing onto an electrified fence and shouting triumphantly as you are being electrocuted, I AM SAFE NOW BECAUSE I KNOW FOR SURE THAT THIS FENCE IS ELECTRIFIED. To which I shout back, I DON’T THINK THAT’S WHAT THE WORD “SAFE” MEANS.
If you are an author, there is zero practically useful information that you can get from such hypervigilance. If it is truly, truly vital for you to know what’s out there because this knowledge creates freelance opportunities for you or something, ask your publicist or agent to do it for you. Or hire a freaking teenager to do it. Teens are great at the internet!
Restrain yourself if you’re a compulsive self-retraumatizer. Those who are prone to the BBs also tend to be subconsciously drawn to hanging out at the air rifle range, as it were.
Do you impulsively text your gross ex or that hypercritical friend when you’re feeling low? Do you keep going back and back to the same key person for a type of reassurance they have never once given you? Are you consistently stumped about why you end up feeling so bad every time you ask someone for “comfort?” U R RETRAUMATIZING YOURSELF, BOO. Know this tendency for what it is, and the next time you feel yourself sleepwalking in that direction, do something else instead. Bubble baths are nice.
Treatment
Here’s a little emotional first aid kit for BB wounds. I hope it comes in handy, although please remember that I am a literary agent, not a medical expert, and what I am offering here is the equivalent of my own homemade, nonsterile Band-Aids. There are actual experts who make real Band-Aids, and those are the ones you should probably be using.
Nevertheless:
Check yourself. BBs do not require instant reaction. In fact, any action you take in the moment will probably just make your injuries worse. Remember, this attack is coming from inside you. So you’re almost certainly not going to make it stop with a lightning-quick apology tweet or public retraction.
Do not react to the BBs at all when they are still pummeling you. Instead, breathe deeply, close your eyes, and become an eyewitness observer. On the inner 1950s Boy Scout air rifle range of your soul, visualize yourself not as the person getting shot, but a random beehived contemporaneous old-lady stenographer watching the proceedings. What is setting those BBs off? Where on your body are they hitting?
Just verbalizing these things might calm you all the way down. “Oh look, a colleague just called me a fraud and a hypocrite in the DMs. This is hitting me straight in my cherished self-concept that I am a transparent, honest person. I am fond of this self-concept for a number of reasons, but I am this attached to it because of fear.
“My brain conflates lovability and legibility with existential safety. How interesting that I feel like the BBs are spraying me in the stomach. I wonder if that’s because I think of my reputation as fundamental to my survival, like food. So my brain is panicking like this is a starvation threat. …Huh!”
I promise that you have time to sit in nonjudgmental observation and curiosity. It’s also fine to cry, wail, lash around in private hysterics, and Take to Bed for a day or two. The point here isn’t doing things “right.” It’s gathering as much useful information as your arms can hold for your own benefit later.
Shock yourself. The BBs are a trauma reaction involving your brain’s limbic system, which fuels memory formation as well as batshit panic. They’re probably striking some painful memories that remind you of the current situation. Not that they’re killing those memories, mind you; they’re BBs, not shotgun shells. They’re just making them agitated and angry.
What you want to do here is distract the fuck out of the agitated and angry memories so that they stop screaming and turn around in confusion to see what you’re doing. (Tranquilizing them is also an option, but if we’re talking about nonprescription drugs or booze, not a great one.)
Jump into an ice cold shower. Go for an aggressive run. Eat a ghost pepper. Or just play a really engrossing video game.
If you’ve never tried the distraction approach, I think you might be genuinely shocked by how well it works.
Connect with people who nourish you.
NB: these are not people who tell you to stop being so crazy. Nor are they people who yell that everyone who makes you feel bad must be an abusive, evil jerk. They might or might not be people willing to poop in a paper bag and light that poop on fire at the doorway of your enemy. The only important thing is that they know your strengths and your flaws and love all of who you are. All.
Reach out to people who remind you that you have inherent worth and value. Who can reassure you that you’re interesting and funny and of course not “a bad person.” That you have a place and safe harbor and agency. These people are medicine for the BBs. Miracle medicine.
A trauma reaction is basically just the paralyzing fear that that your love, safety, and agency are about to be yanked away. Which means that it’s not only completely okay but a great idea to seek out people who will assure you otherwise.
Let go of the idea that there’s a “perfect response.”
You might or might not choose to react to the BBs after they’re done hurting you: an apology, a conversation, a clarification or retraction. Some people will like your response; others won’t.
This is not controllable. What’s controllable is whether or not you calmly act in a manner consistent with your own values and boundaries. Values and boundaries are subjective things. EVERYONE’S ARE. And your own are entirely up to you.
Remember how much trauma there is in the world.
This is not me telling you to minimize, compare, or even necessarily forgive people who attack you. Rather, it’s me begging you to remember that other people’s BBs might or might not be triggered by you, but they’re probably not about you. At all.
My own experiences with the BBs predictably lead to this revelation, and yet I never learn. Here’s how they always (ALWAYS!) go:
In the act of desperately trying to honor someone or make them comfortable, I make a bumbling faux pas. Think: the sort of thing that would ordinarily cause the offending party several minutes of embarrassment and the offended party to react with a loving eye roll.
Through unforeseeable coincidence, my faux pas triggers the BBs in the person I’m talking to. What I’ve said or done happens to underscore some deep-seated private fear I don’t know about or stirs up the memory of a devastating past trauma.
The person blows up. Their emotions arc like lightning straight down the lightning rod of my blunder and into my body, where they also start to electrocute me.
I implode. For the next several days, I feel like I have the flu. I can’t stop thinking about how awful I am. I feel like I am not safe, like all the esteem I have in the world is going to go away. I’m certain it’s all my fault and that it is just my fate in life to be an Unthinking Devastator of Souls. None of this is rational.
Days, months, or even years later, I find out a crucial piece of information that explains the electric reaction: the person had been going through x; the turn of phrase reminded them of y. Which means the faux pas was definitely still on me, but the BBs flying around afterward were not my fault or creation.
Remember: Most of the time, when you open a door, there is just a room on the other side. Occasionally, however, there is an explosive backdraft. And unless you’re a psychotic arsonist going back to view his handiwork, this is not on you.
Be safe. You’re worth protecting. I promise.