Dear reader,
In this newsletter, I’m talking expressly about negative feedback I receive.
Before we go there I want to stress that most of what read—emails, comments, DMs, so forth—is not only not terrible, but one of the best parts of this job.
Proportionally, trollish or weird or terrible or simply unwanted things strangers say to me is maybe 1% (even then, a generous estimate) of what I ingest. The overwhelming majority of what I read from you—about you, about me, about this world and everything else—is kind, vulnerable, intimate, supportive, a privilege. I love reading what’s going on with you. I want to make sure this part is clear.
Alas, less than a percentage point is still a lot of inbound, and can at times be hard to work with, especially when it’s reflective of my own judgments about myself.
That is what this is about. Not about how terrible people are, or what terrible things they say. That’s a distinction.
For the past decade I’ve had one rule for dealing with shitty internet comments: Do not engage, ever.
Whether it’s trollish and shitposty and intended to hurt me, entitled and demanding, misguided or assumptive, or even well-meaning but wildly invasive, my general approach has been to not give anything I don’t want to read about myself — or engage in for whatever reason — any energy at all.
The approach of not-giving-it-energy can take a lot of different forms depending on the medium of communication and the message itself. If it’s a comment on my socials, even if it’s horrible and mean, I might leave it intact and not respond, which is what I do most often. I might delete it but leave the person with access to post again in the future. I might block and bless. Mostly, it depends on what day of my cycle I’m on and how dickish or terrifying the comment is.
Sometimes, I have broken my rule and given the terrible thing energy, either by responding in kind in some truly childish and harmful way, or by going the other route and trying to be like Jesus, responding with some “I see your light, sister” bullshit, and both of these approaches backfire because I’m still trying to manipulate the situation and win at something I will never win at.
If I’m having an angry day and the comment hits close to home and affirms some fear I have about myself, I might spend hours drafting the perfect soul-crushing rebuttal that I never, ever send. If I’m having a sad day I might screenshot it and send it to a friend and ask them to be offended on my behalf or to tell me nice things about myself because some literal stranger just wrecked my mental health.
Because I’m visible, a lady, and have had some ‘unpopular opinions’, I’m talking about how I have managed literally thousands of terrible comments, and any engagement I just described is truly exceptional. For the most part, I don’t internalize, respond, or give energy to things that feel terrible. I have extremely good restraint and near impeccable boundaries when it comes to dealing with inbound everything, and this has paid off in spades. I don’t get mired in one of the worst aspects of this work or spend time clapping back or feeding the machine, and I honestly believe that because I pay it so little mind, it’s lessened the volume I could be experiencing. Energy flows where attention goes and all that.
I tell you all this not because I really want to share my tips for dealing with a sometimes psychopathic internet, but because before I get into the meat of this story, I want to be super clear that I’m not bringing up shitty feedback I’ve gotten just so I can talk about shitty feedback I’ve gotten, or the people who send it. I go out of my way to not highlight it, to not make a big deal about it, to not give it energy.
I am doing so because there’s not really a great alternate way for me to address one of the more soul-killing aspects of writing from the “in-between” — as I’ve been the last 18 months — without talking about how part of what has made it so hard is the judgment I have about being where I am, which has often been reflected back to me by the feedback I’ve gotten.
What happened was a person who’s followed my work for years, with whom I am familiar, started sending me notes a few weeks ago. One came on Facebook; another to my email. Because the one in my email indicated this person might be in trouble (the subject line was ‘SOS’), I opened it. What it said was: You’re not who I remember. Your essays are making me sad. Something is wrong.1
Before you rightfully say, Why didn’t you just dismiss it? — which is what I would say if I were you — I should tell you that at the exact moment I received it, I was sitting at my desk after a day of terrible, awful writing, and already convinced that my work was sad and something was wrong and that I was not who I remember, either. It doesn’t matter whether or not words written to you about you are transparently false. If they catch you at the right time, they can feel like the truest things.
When I didn’t respond to the Facebook message or the email, this person escalated: She sent an email to my editor at Random House, who forwarded it to my agent, who called me on the phone and read it to me. What that one said was: Holly has lost her fire, Holly is wallowing in self-pity and everybody is over it. Someone needs to fix Holly.2
To be clear, my agent and publisher didn’t contact me because they were afraid what this person was saying was true, they contacted me because they were concerned for my safety because part of the email read like a threat.
But that’s not what I heard.
What I heard was they considered this person to be right about me because she was saying what everyone else was thinking.
That I have lost my fire, that I am wallowing in self-pity, that I’ve gone wayward and I’m in some kind of endless despair. That it’s sad and exhausting to read what I’m writing. That I sound like I’m on drugs.
I used to be funny. I used to be lighter. I used to make you feel inspired. I used to be so much of this other certain kind of way. I used to be more positive. It would be great if I could be more positive/could I be more positive? It would be great if I could stick to writing about sobriety. I am no longer relatable. I seem to be lost. I make you want to drink now. You don’t like me anymore.
That I’ve already told this story. That I already sent this email. That I seem to be stuck. That I should be a coach or maybe a contractor or anything else because writing seems really hard and detrimental to my health. Am I sure I should be a writer? That I seem to be deconstructing. That I might drink again. That I might need serious help. That I need to be medicated.
Something is wrong. This is depressing. I am throwing away my career. I am ruining my previous work, you threw away my book, now you see my true colors. I write too much, too lengthy, God damn you can’t with me anymore, I make you sick. I am too vulnerable, I need a thicker skin, I shouldn’t read the comments, I shouldn’t care what anyone but me thinks, I am not being rigorously honest, I keep rebranding myself, I will not get away with this.
(A few things I have read about myself.)3
“We are a culture that says it wants authenticity, but then only praises a performed and sanitized version of it.” - Emily McDowell, on the phone with me talking about Britney Spears
When the center of my life stopped holding in 2021, it was barely a month after I’d become a New York Times best-selling author. The Cut wanted to do a profile on me, The WSJ Future of Everything asked me to give a talk on the future of sobriety, I was in Vogue not once but twice that spring; this is the short list. Right as I was getting these wild opportunities and reaping all that I’d been sowing for years, I totally fucking lost it. And I don’t mean I lost my confidence or my drive or my meaning or my mind — which are things I did indeed lose — but that I lost all interest in being the person I had been being.
Almost overnight I stopped caring entirely about almost everything. Every bit of meaning and purpose and love and duty drained right out of me, pooled around my ankles, brackish and warm, like my water had broken but instead of going into labor I went into indifference.
That was not what worried me.
What worried me was that I knew what would follow would unspool me, and that I was not the kind of (now-public) person who was allowed to become unspooled. I was a person who had made something of herself from her healing, achieved some baseline of functioning and authority and togetherness and wisdom, and people like me weren’t allowed to just change course into negative space or run into the woods wild in their grief, or disappear from the spotlight entirely.
What worried me was that I knew I couldn’t perform to a standard that would keep the identity I’d forged intact, and that to honestly go through what I was about to go through would probably, in one way or another, destroy the identity that gave me a platform, a reason to be heard, and a paycheck. I knew that actually experiencing what I was experiencing was professional self-destruction.
What I wrote about it then (specifically relating to Instagram):
In 2014, when I couldn't find anyone on the internet talking about sobriety as a joy, or alcohol as a cigarette, I started a blog about those things. I also started an Instagram account, and I also started to research how people like me spread messages. The path at the time was, from what I gathered then, to show people how to live their best life through your living your best life; to become, in a verb, Instagrammable. To model yourself as what the model asks, which is to appear to have it all together, all the time, which is why perhaps my first blogs were about how to quit everything, from sugar to narcissistic men. Which is why perhaps I spent hours creating perfect stacks of books to photograph, or why I have 6,000 selfies in my phone. I bought into the religion that it has to look good, even when it's looking bad. Bad now has to look good, so we can make other people feel good about their bad, in an aesthetically pleasing way, so that you're still looking good enough to warrant such a position as to be someone who can talk about the bad in a way that is still aspirational.
It is a specific way of thinking, and a specific way of being; because the bad you share is not the text messages you sent where you were a complete cunt; or what your face looks like in actual depression, when it loses its angles. You are not sharing the dialogue of your fights, or how jealous you actually are of people you've never met. If your hair is a mess on Instagram, it's not a mess in the way it’s a mess when you can't bring yourself to shower for the seventh straight day in a row, it's a mess in a way where it's messy enough to prove you're a mess, but a clean kind of mess, an adorable kind of mess, not a sad kind of mess where people will wonder why you can't bring yourself to shower, and perhaps write you off as a person who should not be heard. You show enough of yourself to show you are real, and you hide the realest parts because those are too real; those parts will count you out, cause the revocation of your Instagram credentials. You cannot say the terrible petty things you actually think, though you can tell people you think terrible petty things without literation beyond the fact that you think terrible petty things, so people know you think terrible petty things too without hating you for what specifically happens in your mind. An Instagram shadow is not a real shadow, but the light obscured, so that it's only depth is the fade filter you use. And this is because we say we want to see it all, but we make monsters of what all really means when we see it. We are liars who cannot handle the truth of what whole humans are. We want blood when we see the truth of what whole humans are.
It is a game, and a game that some people play better than others, who are then rewarded with a status, an elevation, so that we believe that those who play the game well are those whom we should model ourselves after. It is the edge of the world, the steep cliff of the end, where we sleepwalk over it because we are too busy believing we should be more like something we can never be, because we are watching someone else we think we should be, and we don't notice the place where the solid ground ends.
In more direct words: When my life started falling apart, I feared that in order to keep my livelihood and career, I was supposed to use the most gutting experience of my life and make it work for me, to perform my loss in a way that would not jeopardize the image I’d curated, but in a way that furthered it.
And I feared that not because I was being delusional but because I was being realistic.
After I got off the phone with my agent last week about the concerning email, I sent a note to everyone who’d had to read it, assuring them it’s normal to receive notes like it and I’m basically immune and all is well, which was mostly true. Historically, I’ve not paid much mind to the critics, or at least not as much mind as I could.
Except more recently I have, and I have because what the critics are worried about is what I am worried about. I am noticing more because instead of being called a psychotic feminist or an AA-basher or an angry cunt or dangerous sham or pussy-hat Carrie Nation, I am being called things I actually, mistakenly, think are true.
In moments like the one that happened last week — where I’m sitting on the phone with my agent trying to decipher if I’m being handled like a person who’s thrown away her career or a person who just needs to file a restraining order — the thing I keep forgetting to remember is: I chose this. It’s on purpose. The resistance to it, by a relatively few others but mostly myself, is proof that it’s working; not proof it’s a mistake.
I chose to depart from what: was familiar, paid well, would have guaranteed me continued success and access, and probably given me a much more comfortable—albeit far less integral and aligned4—life. I also chose to engage during that departure and subsequent liminality and grief, not despite the fact that I was losing my shit a little5 and becoming something unrecognizable to myself and going through a hard time and not sure what I was doing or if I should even be seen or heard and bereft of meaning and absolutely/probably fucking up my platform, but because of these things.
Because two years ago when I was confronted with choosing my sanity and well-being and authentic experience and ability to sleep through the night and look at myself in the mirror and not hate my life, or my fucking career, I chose the former. And it felt like such a gamble to choose something so obviously necessary to choose. And I thought to myself: This shouldn’t be a gamble! I should not be sitting here weighing my career and livelihood and ability to get health insurance with my ability to perform wellness, health, clarity, surety, wisdom, and togetherness when I don’t have those things.
If I had done the severely unhealthy thing — sucked it up, forced myself through my process and reinvented myself into something that gave me the aura of together and healed, or performed some after version of myself — I would have been rewarded. I also would have been rewarded if I’d waited it out for a few years and only returned to write personal narrative when I had answers and felt some sense of completion to the process. Because that’s what we reward. We reward concluded, fixed, healed, solved, because that’s what we think we should aspire to, what we’re missing. Anything else is an aberration, a sin, not financially lucrative.
Me, writing about what I’m writing about, diverging from the sure path or showing up deeply uncomfortable during my during6 without a single answer: This is the point. Me, being someone you don’t remember, who has lost her fire, who everybody is over, writing essays that make you sad: This is the gig I wanted.
Because to do the thing that would prevent me receiving that criticism is to uphold the same bullshit that makes so many of us absolutely sick and thinking the pinnacle of happiness and a life well lived is appearing to be together, to have figured it out, to be thriving all the time and growing up and to the right, in an aesthetically pleasing way, and all kinds of fabrications and delusions the internet is hungry to provide us to keep us believing our own messy humanity is wrong, or that how we are right now is wrong.
Twelve Things Right Now
A very good book on liminality and change, multiple good writing playlists, multiple good books, hormones and drinking, Threads, farts, apocalyptic joy, more!
The book End of Your World by Adyashanti. One of the best things I’ve read in a long time that’s captured almost perfectly some of the confusion I’ve lived through in the past few years (see the “I got it, I lost it” thread from last week). If you’re feeling in-between, or like you gained some ground or awareness and lost it, or if you just like reading texts on spirituality/consciousness/wisdom traditions/blah blah blah God, this is a great book to add to your collection.
This Johns Hopkins Psilocybin Playlist my friend sent me which is supposed to guide you through a psychedelic experience that I’ve been using instead for background while writing (I also love this and this for the same purpose)
A podcast about hormones and drinking. I was on the Mayo Clinic book podcast with addiction psychiatrist Dr. Kristen Schmidt and Dr. Denise Millstine, which was SO GOOD (not because of me because of the other guest) and I encourage you to listen. Dr. Schmidt researches the intersection of hormones, alcohol, and addiction—I did a poll on Instagram for your questions on the topic (i.e., “How does my cycle affect my cravings” which one of you already asked, ty!), but if you have more please put them in the comments for an upcoming piece for her to attempt.
My friend Sarah has been sending me screen shots of terrible news positioned next to frivolous news in her Apple feed for years (e.g., “Many republicans see a civil war”/“Vanessa Hudgens is making pistachio green the it nail color for summer”), but this one kind of takes the cake:
On the topic of internet FOMO (which includes the rush to learn AI/master ChatGPT to save your career/learn about/buy crypto/adopt Threads/get on the waiting list for BlueSky, etc.), specific to Threads: I am genuinely shocked by how quickly so many of us downloaded7 and used it, and also how quickly Mark Zuckerberg appeared in the news as some kind of white knight compared to Elon Musk (“Musk is doing for Zuckerberg what Trump did for George W.”).
I’ve been thinking a lot this past year about the amplification of cognitive dissonance—how we have more evidence than ever that things need to change, how we’re (seemingly) doubling down on the opposite of what we actually need with this almost loud ambivalence toward it. For instance, Amazon Prime Day—a fucking internet sale—was an actual story shown on GMA replete with QR codes that aired right after a story about record shattering heat waves caused by climate change. Or the re-emergence of thinness as an ideal/heroin chic/Ozempic right as we are starting to truly understand anti-fat bias and fatphobia. Or AI/technology—a cause of isolation—as a solution to it. Etc. I have theories.
Related: this upcoming event I’m attending
📚Finished End Times and I don’t recommend—though I did learn some things, I don’t feel like it gave me any kind of perspective or argued its case that well and I ended up skipping over pages which I rarely do in a book. Capitalist Realism: Easy read, hard recommend. Currently reading: The Left Hand of Darkness, The Rights of Passage, and Enough As You Are: All, so far, are great.
“Find what you love and let it kill you” My girl Emily McDowell debuting on Substack and publishing a two-part series, The Truth About Going Mega-Viral, in which she debunks the All The Myths of success.
Related: this piece on Tony Hsieh
“Why won’t people just let me not be a mom?” In April I gave a talk on not being a mother with some friends at Soho House in London, and one of the things I tried to name was this idea that we have to be mothers to something if we aren’t mothers to actual children, and how diminishing and weird that feels. When I quit Tempest so many people (including myself) tried to insist it had been my child, that the loss I was feeling was akin to losing a real person, which started to feel really wrong and annoying. The idea I had been a mother to a business that had died legitimized my life choices and existence in a conciliatory way, because mothering had been involved somewhere, and that is what people with uteruses are supposed to do. They have to mother. I couldn’t just be a person who had started a business that had failed, like a man (who don’t ‘father’ their businesses or have post-partum depression when they publish books, etc.). Anyway, I didn’t voice that objection so well in that talk that night, but Laura Belgray fucking nailed it in this piece.
Is Borderline personality disorder a real thing?
Lastly: I’m in Mexico this week, primarily to write but also to get my head straight about how I prioritize my time and approach my work, and what feels so hard about it right now. I’ve necessarily spent the last few years not having any kind of discipline or structure and allowing myself to basically do what I want to do, which has been a good counterbalance to what came before. But: the consequence of being distracted and unfocused has started to really show up. Even though I don’t use social media, I use my phone far more than I used to—checking silly things like weather and stocks and news sites and email and texts, and that’s come at a pretty big cost to my attention span, quality of my work, my ability to think deeply, and also just how smart I feel. (There’s plenty of studies that prove this and many books on the topic, but I don’t need a study to tell me that the more time I spend on my phone, the less time I spend doing things I actually love, and the less good I am at the things I care about being good at). I don’t have any great answers yet (other than, make some changes about smartphone use and distraction), but while I’m here I’ve been revisiting two resources I’ve found beneficial in helping me make better decisions about creating: Rick Rubin’s The Creative Act; Cal Newport’s Deep Work. Another one I’m not revisiting but that I highly recommend is Johan Hari’s
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Paraphrasing
Paraphrasing
Mostly paraphrased, some parts verbatim
Which for me, is not a life at all. To be clear.
lol okay lot
Glennon Doyle coined this when she was getting a divorce while promoting her book on saving her marriage. Genius.
I did. I downloaded it. BUT…I did it to see what it was and then deleted it because it made me very sad to even look at. As I’ve written before I’m not deleting my socials, but I don’t use them beyond sharing what I write here and promoting other people’s work. That may change when I have something to promote in the future. I wrote about it here, here, and here.