#71 Resources for when you get cancelled

Plus a little note on what it has to do with addiction recovery

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In my last post, Getting Cancelled, I promised to share resources, and this newsletter includes a number of ones I’ve personally found helpful for navigating cancellation (either as a concept or experience).

Simply investigating the subject of cancellation can feel like I’m sending a dog whistle to the “anti-woke” contingent that exists out there. I’ve found these past few years that just engaging with certain books or media or thinkers or questioning certain ideas can leave me feeling morally compromised (and has definitely raised a few of my friends hackles at times), as if questioning cancellation or call out culture equals Joe Rogan. I want to be clear: this is not that.

Another heavy part of publishing this is that I can feel at least a few butts clenching already at the prospect of providing aid to people who may or may not have done something unconscionable, or who “deserved” to be cancelled, instead of using valuable media space to highlight some other horror or the victims that are harmed by acts that lead to cancellation.

It feels a little bit that by just providing resources, I could be accused of worrying about and aiding the wrong people in the equation. (Which to be clear, is also me.)

But that assumes that everyone who has been cancelled has caused harm, or that punitive measures work. It also assumes that certain people don’t deserve help, compassion, forgiveness, or to even enjoy status as a human being—which is familiar because it’s often how we treat people with addictions.

Through my work, especially the years running recovery programs, as with anyone who participates in mutual-support groups or who works in the field of recovery I’ve come into contact with hundreds if not thousands of different people in various stages of addiction and recovery. As such, I’ve been privy to many different lived experiences and deeply personal accounts of addiction, loss, recovery and healing. Because of my book and writing, I’ve also read (best guess) hundreds of letters over the past decade of the same kind of accounts. In all that, probably just like enough of you who are also in recovery, I’ve connected with some people who have done objectively awful, terrible, regrettable things.

My work has always been centered on the person with the addiction and in my time being in recovery myself and doing this work, I’ve cared first about the human sitting in front of me in pain who is trying to make a change. Part of that kind of caring for someone in that way means you accept them as they are at that moment, and you give them full personhood in that moment, not later when they’ve earned it. You try and hold the forgiveness for them that they can’t give themselves just yet, and you hold a future vision of their life that is bigger than what they can currently imagine.

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Not everyone can do this kind of thing, but plenty of people who work in the field of recovery or participate in mutual support groups do, and they do it consistently, without asking the recipient to qualify for compassion, forgiveness, grace, or acceptance. It’s a baseline from which I and pretty much everyone I know intimately who’s in recovery operate at least on some level. There is no such thing as a lost cause or the worst case; all human life is worth saving; forgiveness belongs to all and is already given.

While these ideas are for sure of a Christian origin, and this particularly smells of religiosity and sin and redemption, the fact is that in recovery, all are theoretically welcome. The AA slogan “keep coming back” is also an invitation; a reminder that you are always still welcome as long as you want to be welcomed.

There’s plenty of downside to using recovery as the model of acceptance and tolerance. Access to recovery is often restricted to those with financial means and is accessed disproportionately by white people; brown and Black and lower socio-economic groups are often routed to the criminal legal system. It’s widely known that certain mutual-support groups don’t recognize people using Medically Assisted Treatment (MAT) such as Suboxone or naltrexone as sober, thus excluding them. Membership to these groups is often contingent on abstinence, and changes to definitions of sobriety can lead to exclusion. Many models can still be paternalistic. I could go on and on and on (and I do! All the time.)

All that said, my experience in recovery taught me a level of tolerance and acceptance that I’ve internalized and carry in those spaces, and my experience that past five years has pushed me to take those concepts and apply them to everyone, including myself. That’s the spirit in which these resources are shared.

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Resources for monsters

I’m sure there are so many more and that I’ve missed many. If you’ve got some to share, please add them in the comments.

1. This Contrapoint video is IMO the best video on cancellation (trigger warning, there is a lot of drinking)

2. SEIZE: Conflict & Cancel Culture on the Left ft. Kai Cheng Thom, Clementine Morrigan & Jay Lesoleil I loved this talk so much, especially about where cancelled people go (sometimes: the extreme right) and whose problem the become (still ours)

3. This conversation between Andrea Gibson and Clementine Morrigan on Fucking Cancelled

4. adrienne maree brown’s book, We Will Not Cancel Us. You can also read this version that has some of the book content, it was the original version she updated after receiving comments.

5. This book was moderately helpful but to me the gist was, if you get canceled, you only survive if you refuse to be cancelled (or something like that). Basically, narcissists fair well.

6. Africa Brooke’s work has been extremely helpful to me, especially since she’s in recovery and her work naturally includes that perspective. She wrote an essay that went viral called Why I’m Leaving the Cult of Wokeness, and has a lot of great resources on censorship and sabotage. I love her podcast (this is my favorite episode) and she has a book out that is practical called The Third Perspective.

7. Conflict Is Not Abuse was great but I did not finish it for some reason

8. [Nerd alert suggestion] I would also probably suggest the book Metamodernism. It’s not directly on topic but it does address what happens when we get past this part/epoch of human development. One of the key observations from my reading and personal experience on this topic is that cancel culture—or our inability to take multiple perspectives mixed with our desire to punish/rid the badness and our need for “the other”—has a lot to do with human and epochal development.

   It goes something like this: if enough people had access to/engaged in development work (healing trauma, growth, waking up, etc.), and reached the transpersonal stage of development (past personalization, past “what about me-ism”), and moved into the development stages past ego- and ethno-centric (stages focused on me, then tribe) into higher tiers of development where multiple perspective taking is a feature (where you’re not stuck on one perspective but can “toggle through” all perspectives, because you aren’t personally attached/identified with any one, so you can access all)—that would fundamentally shift culture. It’s not different than thinking of how the counter-culture movement in the 60s and 70s also fundamentally shifted culture; enough people became aware of something, and the culture tipped.

   One example of this is the ending of Everything Everywhere All At Once —Metamodernism suggests we’re on the cusp of an existence in which we are complexified enough to deal with ambiguity and nuance and to realize everyone is scared and no one knows whats going on and that we might instead of being mad at each other, be kind, etc.

9. Related: This article I wrote about collectively bottoming out and the culture gap being the same thing as the climate crisis

10. This Small Bow episode with the very cancelled James Frey was excellent

11. There were also plenty of books I did not like! Cynical Theories and even Jonathan Haidt’s work can read like liberal backlash instead of constructive discussion; Ive also tried to listen to Sam Harris on this topic, he’s done a lot, but I think his own biases really get him sometimes and it still feels like “those other people are the problem” kind of shit which is, IMO, the problem.

12. This First Person podcast “The Left is Eating Itself” discusses infighting at the emerging tip of consciousness (the progressive left) and this book discusses what the emerging tip of consciousness is, and why infighting has consequences for everyone

13. Maurice Mitchell on building resilient organizations

14. “Personal and political shaming is running hot, yet it doesn’t work”