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.
