Unwifeable(77)

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2012–15

GETTING TO WORK with Jane Pratt and edit first-person stories from women around the world is a dream come true. Finding myself alienated from my friends and family is not.

It’s hard to understand how I go from a place of love and healing and understanding with my family to what happens next, but the repercussions of directly tapping into the vein of my personal life to write about traumas or regrets is unsettling for people who are much more private individuals, which everyone in my family definitely is. One of my earliest pieces for the site is about losing my virginity to rape, and there is a tremendous amount of awkwardness in discussing the piece with my parents. It feels a bit grotesque, exhibitionistic, and unprocessed. Of course, I’m still proud of the piece that I wrote, but it’s a double-edged sword. There is also a part of me that is sacrificing my own emotional boundaries for the sake of my new job—and Internet clicks.

Every bit of my personal pain becomes commodified and packaged, and sometimes the experiences and revelations don’t go over well with my family. My mom is horrified when I write about her obsessive-compulsive disorder. (We’ve gotten past that now, obviously.) My sister thinks I’m revealing too many things about my life and tells me she feels uncomfortable with the whole thing.

All the “feel the peace in a flower” sentimentality and ease I felt before is trampled. Now there are fights with my family and friends, who wonder: Why am I airing all my dirty laundry for the world when I haven’t even finished examining it myself?

When my mom mentions offhandedly to me that maybe she’ll write something I won’t like in the comments, I block her on Facebook. She doesn’t understand how the Internet works, that there are plenty of strangers out there who make an active hobby of hating me online already. The last thing I need is that kind of threatening vitriol from her. My sister and I eventually stop talking because she is squeamish about some of the stories I am writing, so I angrily unfriend her on Facebook, too.

My dad and I barely speak at all.

But none of that matters, really. Because who needs to talk when you have thousands of anonymous avatars to interact with for hours on end with a constant feedback loop that never stops? New comment notifications pop up rapid-fire everywhere I go, and it feels like a mob of faceless people—some friends, some fans, some haters—who are constantly following me around commenting on the most deeply personal aspects of my life, soul, and mind.

It’s hard for me to even write about this period—and I’ve obviously condensed it dramatically—by virtue of having had to already dissect every little thing that happened in my life at that time either within xoJane or on the weekly podcast that I eventually start called News Whore. I realize that almost every single relationship in my life has now returned to the completely transactional variety.

It is the anti–San Diego.

There is a true irony that people who are blogging or podcasting all about the minutiae of their lives are sometimes the loneliest people of all. I rarely date or get out of the house. I sometimes go to therapy and meetings, but my workaholism is a mask for not actually having any kind of life. If something doesn’t lead to a post I can write (“It Happened to Me: I Had Fun Catching Up with an Old Friend Who Actually Kind of Gives a Shit About Me” is not quite clickbait gold), then why bother?

I just don’t have the time. I’m online and on the phone all day from wake-up to pass-out, finding stories, slinging stories, editing stories, writing stories, promoting stories, trying to keep those clicks up, up, up.

When a news story breaks, I reach out to those involved the instant that I can—individuals who are (like me, in some of the highly personal pieces I write for the site) still in the middle of processing whatever it is they are going through. When I speak to Sydney Leathers about writing a piece for the site reflecting on her role in the explosive Anthony Weiner scandal, we speak for a few hours and she really opens up.

“I just fired my manager,” she tells me. “She wanted me to do porn. I was like, no.”

Then the other line rings mid-conversation. It is Sydney’s manager calling.

“I have to take this,” she says.

I never get a return call from Sydney, although we reconnect years later. Her manager only lets me communicate through her, tells me Sydney is in fact going to do porn and now will only do a piece for us if we can pay $500, which is ten times our (admittedly, not very great) rate.

That piece teaches me something about the rapid-fire pace of the world. In a matter of a single hour, someone can literally become a porn star and her entire life trajectory will change. Eventually, Jane approves the fee—and the piece publishes.

Of course, it is a big traffic hit, as are many first-person pieces I secure and edit for the site: important narratives from rape survivor Daisy Coleman, who went on to do a Neflix documentary; Tuesday Cain, a fourteen-year-old who went viral for her “Jesus Isn’t a Dick; So Keep Him Out of My Vagina” sign at a pro-choice rally; revenge porn crusader Charlotte Laws; Steubenville gang-rape blogger Alexandria Goddard; and Shauna Prewitt, who wrote a searing open letter to politician Todd Akin about being a rape survivor and then bearing the child (destroying his narrative that a woman can’t actually get pregnant if she is the victim of “legitimate rape”). Over time, these viral stories become expected of me as the rule rather than the exception. Instead of any kind of financial compensation or reward, the metric of expectations for my job performance simply changes: Give me that—all the time.