Before Your Words Can

In Daring Greatly, Brené Brown tells the story of man who had a great love for art in his childhood. He took art classes and the family refrigerator displayed his greatest works. Once, his visiting uncle gestured to the fridge and made a comment to the boy’s dad. What the art meant about the kind of son he was raising. That was the end of the boy’s art career. The picture he’d drawn of the family home the day before was his last. Ever. Brown said, “...I wept for him and for all of us who never got to see his work… I know it’s a tremendous loss for him, and I am equally positive that the world is missing out.”

Most of my writing life I’ve been shielded from direct criticism of my work. For better or for worse. The decade I spent at one parenting magazine I both wished I saw more feedback and was grateful for the buffer. The buffer was two layers thick. The first, editors who made me sound smoother and more professional than I was in my early twenties. Second, we were print. So there was no comments section. When we did go online, I was our first web editor. I posted all our articles on the website, blogged, and started all our first social media accounts. Still, web traffic wasn’t adequate for trolling. Or even criticism. Okay, besides one other staff writer who hated everything I stood for and loved to write about it.

So, trolls were new to me about a year ago when my videos started getting traffic. My first comment was on a video about raising ADHD kids where a nice gentleman commented, “I can’t believe anyone would have kids with that fat pig.” A quick kick in the gut, but within minutes, cackle-fodder for me and my friends. Seriously? As Brene says, the anonymous trolls in the comments section who aren’t in the arena getting their asses kicked don’t get a say. I haven’t lost a wink of sleep over those.

I wrote some weeks ago about my deeply personal experience with the book, Yesteryear by caro claire burke. The book wasn’t the cultural satire I expected when I picked it up. Instead, I found myself walking through an alternate reality with my same brain. The details were different but as I wound through the story it was clear the author had been lurking around my brain, mapping my movements and scrawling her take as she went.

Photo by Vika Fleysher on Unsplash

Some loved the book. Some hated it. Either way, responses were passionate. I think we all expected to see the tradewife-championing conservative takedown of this book. But I personally did not anticipate watching caro shredded to tiny little bits and pieces by those who aligned with her more ideologically. Am I calling writers out for that? No. That is absolutely their right. Art and criticism have a deeply symbiotic relationship. Would I even have noticed the bloodbath if I hadn’t gotten wrapped up in it? I’m not so sure.

A week and a half after my article, I received a DM from Lane Anderson from Matriarchy Report. A review of Yesteryear dropped, citing my essay as “evidence”. An AI detector showed my essay to be 82% AI. The use of these tools has been widely debated and I’m not going to relitigate that here. What I do want to address is how the accusation was used. Nothing to do with AI. Everything to do with dismissal. My experience with the book, and yours, was declared hollow. We were effectively removed from the conversation. And then the review moved on to other, actually relevant things. Proving that this part of the conversation wasn’t even necessary. Just included, just because.

Lane kindly went right to my defense. She’d heard my thoughts and feelings about the book before publication and knew they were not “hollow”. She knew my personal story was real, partly because of the ways it matched hers. We did a live that day about our experiences in high-control religion, as mothers, and the parts of our stories we saw in Natalie’s, the main character in Yesteryear. It wasn’t just me. And it wasn’t just Lane. So many of you reached out about having similar experiences. Reading the book and seeing pieces of yourself. Pieces of your lives.

Your comments rolled in on my article. On caro’s posts. All over the place. On a normal day I would have been all over them! Responding. Connecting. Validating. But the pressure and the shame of what I was afraid I was costing all of us with the credibility of my story being questioned had me frozen. I let the criticism cut me off at the knees. I let it gag me. Shut me up.

I watched this unfold again just this last week. I finished reading Belle Burden’s book Strangers, just in time for a financial hit piece in the New Yorker to drop alongside it. A bombshell I heard referred to as a “nothing burger”. The information was accurate. Even if the point they were making wasn’t. But accuracy wasn’t the point at all. The point was to show up before her words could. To plant that seed of doubt. To sustain the pattern that women writing from personal experience need their credibility verified before their stories can be heard.

The mechanism doesn’t need to be coordinated to be a pattern. It just needs the same assumptions running repeatedly.

A few months ago, I read the book Calling In by Loretta Ross. She has worked in advocacy, primarily around rape and women’s rights, for decades. My primary takeaway from the book was the dangers of friendly fire within a movement. She explains the differences between a cult and a movement: “When people think the same idea and move in the same direction, that’s a cult. When people think many different ideas and move in one direction, that’s a movement.” In her experience what most activists want is a cult. Diversity is not allowed. For things to be done differently (wrong!) is untenable. There is one way. The correct way. So they call each other out, tear each other down. Instead of creating a strong united front, they weaken the message, the movement, and the impact. What does it mean when the people most loudly defending women writers are also the ones policing which women’s writing counts as real?

I’ve just finished writing a memoir. And all of this has left me wondering if I have what it takes. Can I survive this world that caro and Belle are living in? Will my life be more of waking up every day to find out who hates me today (there have been many copycat articles and comments)? Working constantly through what’s real? What matters?

The man in Brene Brown’s story put down his pencil and never picked it up again. Someone with more authority over his life than they deserved put an end to his creative journey. Does my book go on the shelf next to that picture he drew of his family home? No. But I couldn’t answer that question last week. The pit in my stomach. The silence. The gag.

This week I remember a little more who I am. Why I speak. Why I write. What my writing sounds like and why. Last week I wasn’t sure I could say that out loud. This week I can.