RERUN: "Oh God, oh God, I'm Getting Viciously Criticized by a Bunch of People on the Internet. What Do I Do?"
My advice for a near-inevitability if you're an anxiety-prone author who Just Wants to Be [regarded as a] Good Person.
Hello from a week ago! This is a scheduled post; I come back from vacation at the end of next week.
I chose this week’s rerun, which originally ran in 2021, for two reasons—
ONE: I just finished R. F. Kuang’s novel Yellowface, and its depiction of maladaptive social behavior in book publishing, particularly online, might or might not have kept me up until 2am with secondhand anxiety shakes.
This made me want to re-up the Shame Spiral first aid kit I created years ago.
You don’t have to be a thieving cluster-B disaster like that novel’s narrator—or make intentional mistakes at all, let alone intentional mistakes on that character’s scale—to experience the kind of ferocious online criticism she does after publishing “her” (spoiler alert: not her) book. Such experiences are unfortunately quite common for authors.
If one happens to you, you unfortunately also don’t need to have the narrator’s level of inner dysregulation and unprocessed trauma to feel in the moment like you’ll never recover. Mass online criticism stomps on our most basic, reptilian fear as a member of a social species—that of being outcast, done.
For any human being within any standard deviation of the psychic bell curve, this is an enormous, terrifying, profound emotional injury. And it’s one you’ll need to tend, no matter who you are and what you’ve done.
I repeat: no matter who you are and what you’ve done.
There is simply no scenario, no matter what if any transgression you’ve committed, in which your spinning out in self-annihilating distress benefits anyone—not you, not anyone else, not innocent victims, not predators, not critics, not any social cause, not the planet. NO SCENARIO.
OK?
For yourself AND OTHERS, the immediate next steps you need to take when you experience system-dysregulating criticism is is take care of yourself until your brain comes back online. Every single time. It’s going to be impossible to move on, make amends, or grow until you do.
TWO: When I originally wrote the piece below, I’m not sure I emphasized strongly enough how often these mass-criticism scenarios involve trauma that is moving through you but is not about you.
This is something Kuang depicts masterfully in Yellowface. Even her narrator, who has an obvious personality disorder, acts from a place of wild loneliness, emptiness, and grief triggered by the childhood loss of her father, the one person who ever truly paid attention to her.
Kuang’s story is a hellscape in which authors and artists electrocute each other over and over again with history’s lightning: generational trauma, grief, white supremacy, colonialism, war, misogyny, addiction, loneliness. That lightning just keeps arcing back and forth, back and forth, hurting and hurting and hurting people.
If you’re an author in any kind of structural position of power over others—and psst, unless someone reading this happens to live in an edge-of-the-margins marginalized population in the Global South, all of us are in some version of that position—history’s lightning is likely going to find you this way.
Someone with less structural power than you—or someone claiming to speak on their behalf—is going to call you out or call you in or weep and scream at you or otherwise tell you you’re blind to something and/or have hurt them. And, ZAP.
If you’re a well-meaning person—especially, perhaps, ahem, a neurodivergent one—this is going to feel like shit. It’s so, so painful.
Yes, and remember: this is history’s lightning you’re feeling, history’s shame. It’s not something you created; it’s also not something created by the person you’ve hurt. It’s a historic, population-level force entering your body from theirs. The work of social justice is to bring these bolts to the ground, one by one, until we’re all safe, starting with the most vulnerable and susceptible people.
The work of social justice also involves doing whatever it is we can to make ourselves less conductive.
So the next time you get hit—are are you going to electrocute someone else with history’s lightning, or are you going to do what it takes to stop being conductive?
*
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.