Feelings versus facts
Since the age of about 19, one thing that’s always felt like constant in my life is my desire to be a journalist. This year, I felt that terrain slowly start to shift beneath me for the first time. Through a pandemic, a reckoning over racism, an election, and vast changes in my personal life, I have been grappling with all kinds of questions about the industry I’ve tried so hard to succeed in and the work I am engaged in.
Among those questions: Is a devotion to empirical facts above all else really that effective when much of the population doesn’t believe in the basic tenets of science? How can a news story address the divisiveness of “politics” without acknowledging the widespread emotional distress and mental health issues that leave so many people vulnerable to conspiracy theories like QAnon or Covid-denialism? What am I doing to my own mental health by staking my career and survival on an online industry that is precarious, relentless, and ruthless? Is this level of news production and consumption even helpful to society? And can we really rely on the unquestioned rules of journalism — which were created by and have been defined through the ages by white, male-led institutions — to help reshape our world into a less racist, more justice-minded one?
A lot of those questions related to an experience I had earlier this year. On the face of it, a good thing happened: I got a byline in the New York Times. I did not ask to write this piece, but rather, in the very early days of Covid, before it was even declared a pandemic, an editor for the Op-Ed pages asked the publication where I was employed if we had something to say about the virus’ effect on the travel industry. Over the next 24 hours, I conceived and pitched the topic, wrote the piece, went through edits, and saw my name in the Times typeface for the first time.
The whole process was an entirely emotionless enterprise. The gold standard of American journalism asked me if I had something to say, and so I did what any ambitious journalist would: I came up with something, and I relied on every shred of experience I’d amassed in the last decade to not lose my nerve while delivering it.
The piece came out. It was initially fine. There were no errors or corrections (every journalist’s biggest fear, but especially in this case). The Times editor has since asked me to pitch her in the future. My parents and bosses and everyone who loves me was proud. Random people from all areas of my life emailed me saying “I saw you in the New York Times!”
But also, the piece got caught up in a right wing, Fox News, MAGA internet wormhole, which meant for three or four months I was subject to pretty excessive trolling and abuse. This started in February and continued during the height of the first lockdown, so in addition to the outside world being a very unsafe place, my inbox and mentions and DMs were, too. I’ve certainly had plenty of people be mad at me on the internet before, but this was different. It felt like an organized campaign that the angry people, stuck in their homes, never moved on from. Being on the end of it was one of the most isolating and terrifying experiences I’ve ever had.
Don’t get me wrong: Being asked for your opinion by the New York Fucking Times is a big old ego hit. It’s the kind of thing I have, ostensibly, worked toward my whole career. So why did it feel so terrible? On some level, I know that my piece just got caught up in the woeful corner of the internet that is engaged full time in hating both the New York Times as well as women who have an opinion and a platform to express it. But it wasn’t just that.
I think it’s revealing that the repeated advice I was given as countless angry men (yes, all men) filled my inbox and DMs was to ignore them. I have worked pretty hard to be a person whose feelings, intellect, and body are integrated. As such, I found that I was not capable of compartmentalizing multiple people every hour telling me that I am a fucking idiot who does not deserve to be employed or thrive in the world — even if those people possess a worldview I find abhorrent or deranged.
But I shouldn’t have been surprised. That expectation is implicit in being in the business of the 24/7 internet news cycle, especially if you’re a woman and/or a member of a marginalized group. Just ask Maggie Haberman, arguably the most successful journalist of our era — and one whom I greatly respect — whose life sounds like a traumatic nightmare in this post-election profile. Or consider the more prosaic expectation that journalists watch the news get steadily worse every damn day, send an ironic emoji reaction on Slack about how we’re all living in hell, and yet never look away to make space for how they feel, lest they miss the next episode of the unfolding horror show.
I felt like the implicit message of this so-called high point of my career was such: You cannot allow yourself to feel your feelings. You cannot lose your nerve. You always have to have something to say, no matter the cost.
I want to be very clear that I don’t think this was anyone’s fault. Everyone was just doing their job here, in the way that modern online journalism works. I still think it was an honor I was asked to write the piece, and if it hadn’t taken on an odious life of its own online, maybe I wouldn’t be writing these words now. But for better or worse, the experience made me more clear-eyed about the ladder I was on, the price of admission at the top, and whether I actually wanted to keep climbing it.
There are other things that have contributed to my sense that being a full-time journalist always plugged into the machine may not be for me anymore: The fact that I do not want to spend nearly as much time in the next ten years sitting before a screen as I did in the last. That the pandemic made me realize that having time to invest in learning offline skills (like, say, knowing how to grow and preserve your own food) is pretty damn useful in a world that’s only going to get more precarious. The fact that I simply want to work less. And above all, a strong instinct that I’m not going to have my biggest impact on the world by keeping the part of me that feels separate from the part of me that loves facts.
None of this is to suggest that I won’t continue to write or do journalism in the ways that feel appealing to me. But when I resigned from my full-time job in August, I did it with the sense that I may not have a full-time job as a reporter again soon. I have tremendous respect for many journalists and editors, and the job I resigned from was a good one. But as life sometimes does, the universe gave me an offramp in the form of a ghostwriting project that comfortably pays my bills for now. I sighed with relief and took it.
Having a full time journalism job is both a privilege and an achievement, now more than ever, thanks to the dwindling number of journalism outlets that offer gainful employment. I definitely feel a little grief for that identity, considering I worked so damn hard to get it. But as I wrote in the last edition, grief begets transformation, if you let it.
Often, it is an outsider who has little idea how your industry or profession works who has the keenest grasp of your situation. My friend Ashley Handel, who is a yoga teacher and coach, told me it sounded like I was only interested in writing from a grounded, integrated place. A place where I could feel that what I was writing was in alignment with what I felt, who I was, and not merely was in service of a machine that demanded I always have something to say. It’s a strategy that is totally unfit for the modern news cycle — which is precisely why it sounds so appealing to me. Funnily enough, it also describes how I feel about the writing I do in this newsletter.
I have wavered about whether or not I should tell this story, right up to the moment of hitting send. However, I think this moment is calling those of us who can to make big shifts. 2020 is not a uniquely bad year, it is a year where everything broken has been laid bare for us to see. The privileged among us have an obligation to look at our lives and ask: Am I using my resources and abilities in the most justice-minded, expansive way that I can? When I looked honestly at my life this year, the answer to that was no.
(With thanks to Ali and Lianna for feedback and edits.)
Things I wrote this month:
In a piece that felt particularly good to write, I considered whether personal career ambition is still useful in a world facing an urgent climate emergency and myriad other existential crises. And if we’re not going to be ambitious, what should we be instead? That it seemed to resonate with so many people made me feel vaguely hopeful. [Forge]
So Biden won, thank God. I wrote about how America doesn’t deserve to be redeemed this time. [Forge]
Things I enjoyed reading:
How Reddit’s ‘Am I the Asshole?’ channel became the internet’s most humane and unlikely place for conflict resolution. [The Ringer]
Extremely into Kamala’s model of waiting until her late forties to get married. [Washington Post]
Jack Monroe on food poverty, single parenting, and the price of potatoes in the Tories’ (cruel) Britain is essential reading. [Cooking on a Bootstrap]
How often are you thinking about ventilation in relation to Covid risk? The answer should be all the time. Fortunately, this piece makes the topic quite a lot of fun. [The Atlantic]
The election is over (kind of) but the divisiveness is not. Gene Weingarten captures it well. Read to the end for the payoff. [Washington Post]
Economist Emily Oster’s framework for parents assessing risks during the pandemic seems like great advice for everyone. [Bloomberg]
A few years ago I probably would have made fun of this, but now I’d send every heterosexual man I know to “Man Camp” if I could. [Guardian]
Hadley Freeman’s celebrity profiles have been especially good lately: Nigella on a Campari soda paired with “that fantastically retro thing of putting crisps in a bowl,” and Helena Bonham Carter just being her infuriatingly eccentric self.
On people who have left journalism — and learned to live. [Vice]
If you didn’t read Vanity Fair’s profile of AOC, do that (the outfits!). As a coda, read this scathing post-Biden victory interview where she outs establishment Democrats and admits: “I’m serious when I tell people the odds of me running for higher office and the odds of me just going off trying to start a homestead somewhere — they’re probably the same.” [NYT]
Things I enjoyed listening to
I’m critical of the endless discourse around avoiding burnout (maybe we should all just try working less?), but I love the idea of looking to animals as a model for completing the “stress cycle.” [Unlocking Us]
An eight part, extremely eye-opening series on how student loans in America are a predatory grift. [Borrowed Future]
Kara Swisher gets advice from Esther Perel on how to deal with her Trump-loving relatives. [Sway]
Word Soup
“The gentle hum of communication from the body to the brain, the stuff beyond words, that’s where my interest is.” —Naomi Annand
“Think of yourself as a nesting doll: How many versions of yourself have you carried this far, to this point? How many more iterations will there be as you age? Know there is room for all of you.” —Maggie Smith
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