It's Time For Some People to Let Me Go

set it free, guys, set it free

me

Everything about this is ill conceived and unhelpful and will not leave me in any better position than before I wrote it. But plead I must.

About eight months ago a small group of journalists told two different lies about my first novel on BlueSky. The Mind Reels is a modest but deeply-felt story of a young woman succumbing to bipolar disorder, inspired by my own experience of slowly going crazy and being diagnosed at a state psychiatric hospital when I was 20. I won’t say who told these lies, because this post isn’t about score-settling, but if you don’t value your precious minutes on earth you can search through my BlueSky burner to see who I was interacting with back then. They’re paid-up people in the media’s weird quasi-political pecking order, and they surely knew that they could get away with saying untrue things about my book because I am unpopular, a designated target who deserves none of the graces that conventional morality demands, like basic honesty. But it is in fact the case that the things they said were not true, and the truth has a certain inextinguishable reality no matter how popular or unpopular the target of a lie may be. I shouldn’t have to argue that point, no one should, but I do.

The first lie: one of them claimed that it was an “antiwoke” novel, a political work that attacked modern social liberalism. This is simply untrue; the book is resolutely apolitical, has zero interest in what you might call issues of contemporary political debate, and to the degree that it has any implied politics at all, they’re exclusively the politics of psychiatric medicine, which certainly don’t map onto a woke-antiwoke framework. A lot of people with conventional social justice politics have read and enjoyed the book. Besides - and you will see that this has become a theme - the book had not yet been published, and I knew where every galley had been sent, and anyway the guy who made this claim is someone who would never deign to read a novel by me. So, you know, a very weird thing to lie about. The other media insider type claimed that the book was blurbed by Andrew Sullivan and Pamela Paul. This was also just not true. Neither Sullivan nor Paul blurbed the book, and in fact it hadn’t occurred to me to ask them, simply because they wouldn’t make sense as blurbers for that kind of a project. As you’d expect, the book is blurbed by people in the literary world, two novelists and a New Yorker writer. This is a very strange thing to lie about, particularly given that (again) the book did not yet exist in its retail form and as such no blurbs existed.

I discovered this, I believe, by putting the title of the book in the BlueSky search bar. I have a Google alert on that phrase, not that Google alerts really work anymore, but while that sometimes tips me off to things said on Twitter, I don’t believe it works on BlueSky. And I want to know what people are saying about my work, so I frequently go looking for reactions, typically by sticking the link to a piece in the search bar on a social network. This is a behavior that is considered very low class and embarrassing by the stratum of people who were also responsible for those lies. To admit to searching for reactions to one’s work is a pre-mocked activity, in that world. This is one of those things where I just feel like I’m on a different planet from the hivemind of the industry. I care about my work and want to know what other people think about it, so of course I go looking for opinions about it. Why on earth would I be embarrassed to gauge the reception of a piece I wrote? Just seems so uncomplicated to me. But please, understand that I am aware that it’s very embarrassing that I went looking for discussion of my upcoming novel, a novel into which I poured decades of pain and frustration over the disorder that has crippled me.

Anyway, I saw those lies, and I responded on the burner by saying, hey, these lies are lies. And of course this got a little pile-on going. You have to understand that all of these networks are driven by a desperate need to be validated by the group, and there’s no easier way to feel like you’re part of the crowd than with shared hate. Both of the people who had lied held me up for mockery to the crowd; the first did so and then promptly blocked me. The crowd reacted the way it always does. Neither denied that they lied, but neither admitted anything either, and they both engaged with the kind of smirking faux-disaffection and theatrically smug demeanor that is the true legacy of Twitter. Dozens and dozens of others piled on. (Again, you can click around in the replies to that BlueSky burner if you’d like to see.) What’s kind of crazy is how little interest anyone had in the question I was raising, which was where the things being said were true. That the lies I was objecting to actually were lies was simply not remarked on; that would have been inconvenient for the team-building exercise. Instead the topic at hand became how embarrassing it was that I had showed up to dispute straightforwardly dishonest and factually incorrect statements about my own work. Aren’t you embarrassed?, they asked on BlueSky. Somebody even sent me an email to ask the same question. Aren’t you embarrassed?

To which I said, no, of course I’m not embarrassed. It’s not remotely embarrassing to refute a lie told about you. What’s embarrassing is to be the person who told the lie. That’s what’s embarrassing. Being part of the peanut gallery and completely ignoring the truth or falsehood at issue, in favor of naked appeals to popularity and tribe, that’s embarrassing. Choosing to excuse lies because you’re trying to defend your social position among a bunch of people who don’t actually know or like you is embarrassing. Being honest can’t be embarrassing; being dishonest is always embarrassing. And it doesn’t matter how many people you can rally to your cause. The truth can’t be crowdsourced.

Of course, all of this stuff is recursive; if the same people catch wind of this post, and there’s a decent chance they will, they’ll declare this to be embarrassing, too. They’ll go through the same ritualistic mockery that they did that day, the same they’ve engaged in since like 2010, only now they’re mostly all middle aged and far too old to be behaving this way. They’ll dunk, they’ll chortle, they’ll bring me out as the designated sin-eater once again, all to give them the opportunity for validation that they crave. That none of them would ever make the affirmative case “it’s OK to lie if the person you’re lying about is unpopular” doesn’t change the fact that that is indeed the logic behind all of it. Well, I think the truth matters, regardless of who you’re talking about, and I think it’s shameful to be so shameless. Who raised you people?

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I know that a number of you will have already theatrically groaned and deleted this email once you identify my purpose here, which is your right. But I do have to write this all down, if only to get it on the record for when I die. The reality is that I exist in this weird punitive cone of silence in the media industry and have for many years, and it’s not justifiable based on my actual beliefs or actions. My actual views are constantly misrepresented by others, and the misrepresentations have been both a drag on my career and the source of some real interpersonal sadness. And while basic real life things have gotten much much better for me, now nine years into being medicated and stable, there’s this ongoing, pointless shunning campaign that’s shuffling on, zombie-like, leaderless but very much alive. I would like to be free of it, especially because no one is willing to offer an affirmative justification for it in moral reasoning terms. It’s all backchannel, but it’s real, and it’s harmful, and I am not guilty of the kind of harms that should be permanently disqualifying of just getting work, especially given the mitigating factor of my biggest scandal, which I will address.

What I’m asking for is limited and specific. I don’t want people who don’t like me to start liking me. I don’t want my many critics to become supporters. What I would like is a) for people in media who have engaged in real and explicit efforts to prevent my work from being published or discussed to reevaluate whether I deserve those active efforts, in a business filled with bad actors, and b) for all types of people to stop telling direct lies about my beliefs or my behavior. Just stop lying, OK? Both of my first two nonfiction books have been the subject of out-and-out lies about their arguments, lies which have been used as justification for them to be ignored by establishment media; as I said above, my first novel was the subject of bizarre falsehoods about not just its contents but the blurbs that appear on it, which is so weird; I routinely see exchanges on social media where someone is harangued for linking to or praising my work, harangues which inevitably include just straightforward lies about my beliefs. I would like for it to stop, please. I would like to be attacked for what I actually believe and have actually said, not what others have decided about me. And these requests should have nothing to do with one’s feelings towards me; they should be granted out of basic personal integrity.

I’m not naive, though. I am well aware that the response from that crew is going to be “lol lol lol lol lmao lol,” the same tired blank sarcasm from people who honestly are far too old to be engaging in that behavior at this point. But I have other goals than trying to sway the diehard haters. Rather I’m trying to reach third parties, particular gatekeepers in the creative fields. I’m asking that people investigate the truth about what’s said about me by my most dogged critics. (You can email me.) I’m asking people to research if I’ve actually said or done whatever comically evil thing I’m accused of. I’m trying to reach people who have heard things about me that aren’t true, have noticed that there’s a weird obsessive attitude towards me like the one seen in that BlueSky incident, and might be willing to admit that it’s all strange and unhelpful. I’m asking the community writ large to please aspire to higher principles than popularity, to set aside the weird theatrics of ambient opinion among peers in favor of privileging the work. Judge the work. The work is the only ultimately enduring value. The work itself.

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This is all likely helpless, but not saying anything doesn’t get me anywhere either. And, just… fuck it.

The reality is that for a long time, including long before any genuine scandal, people in the industry have conspired against my career. I know how that sounds, but it’s true. In the olden days, when Twitter was still the crucible of media careers, people openly said that I should not be given opportunities in establishment media and encouraged others to advance that belief. An editor would publish a piece, and that piece would be good and profitable, and various figures within the industry would melt down and insist that I never be published in that particular venue again, ostensibly because I am wicked, really because at some point in their lives I made them feel foolish. And it goes far beyond that and into organized attempts to prevent me from having a career.

To be clear, I’m directly alleging that people in the business have gone past criticism of me or my work and have instead actually attempted to convince leadership at various publications to reject my pitches out of hand. Sometimes this goes beyond trying to implement rules that I not be published and goes to the extent of insisting that I not be linked to or mentioned. You can dismiss this as paranoia, but I’ve been made aware of specifics probably a half dozen times since I started doing this, and of course if I’ve heard about it that many times, it’s certainly happened many more. If anybody wants to report it out, feel free. Or if you’d like to email me to tell me about things like this that you’ve witnessed, please do. I will protect your anonymity. But somebody eventually has to put the truth above the approval of their peers. Otherwise it’s all a joke.

For example. In I think 2014 or so, when my freelancing career was really taking off, a prominent writer sent me emails from a chain made up of a smallish group of people in the industry, emails in which they actively encouraged each other to prevent me from getting published by their employers. I stewed about it for days, but I knew anything I did would make it worse, so I just went about crossing more venues off of my “To Publish In” list. But of course those efforts have hurt my career, and of course my determination to just keep publishing through it was an expression of powerlessness as well as of resolve. Stuff like that email chain is on the extreme end, but this sort of thing has been happening throughout my nearly twenty years in the business. The response, when I’ve complained about this, is what you’d expect - people insisting that I’m not important enough for anyone to conspire against, then saying that I deserve any such treatment and that I’m owned for being mad about it. A pretty classic example of the old “that isn’t happening, but it’s good that it’s happening” bit. And they extend that same attitude to the lying: no one is telling lies about you, we don’t care about you!, OK we said bad stuff about you, OK that stuff wasn’t true, but regardless, you’re owned for acting like the truth matters and anyway it’s OK to lie about you.

I Think You Should Be Kind

A lie that’s particularly constant and particularly distressing is that I’m transphobic and opposed to trans rights. This is just false; I’ve been in favor of trans rights and trans representation since before most people knew what it meant to be trans. I grew up around all manner of sexual orientation and gender minorities, including trans people. And none of my positions are contrarian or idiosyncratic or whatever; my views on that topic are completely conventional progressive views. You can read about my thoughts in the post linked above. Yet claims that I’m anti-trans are made relentlessly, I guess because it’s seen as a particularly damning accusation in those circles. And yes, it gets around - people will tell me that they mentioned me to someone else, and that person will say “Isn’t he transphobic?” This is painful because I’ve known a lot of trans people in my life and I hate the idea of one of them hearing that lie and thinking that I don’t support them. And I’m also an abortion rights absolutist and an open borders type and I hate racism and empire and, in fact, many of my critics cannot make a single issue on which we disagree. So they make up ugly views and call them mine.

The zenith of the Just Lying About Freddie era was when there was a day-long Twitter meltdown involving hundreds of accounts, most of them bluechecks in the industry, expressing outrage about the contents of my first book… which I had not yet written. This was in 2018, before there was any manuscript to critique, let alone the finished book. The Twitter storm was massive, encompassing thousands of tweets, many of them from high-follower journalists and pundits and podcasters and editors. This was a year after my 2017 crisis and my slander against Malcolm Harris (see below); the funny thing was, though I definitely deserved censure for the 2017 incident and the 2018 was built on literally nothing I had actually said or done, the latter meltdown was bigger and nastier. They were all reacting to claims about an unwritten book that, I found after a lot of digging, had been made by a single shitposting account with about 800 followers and a Michael Cera avatar. (I wish I could find it now.) He was saying that it was a race science book, that it asserted genetic intellectual inferiority in Black people. But the book’s very premise was that after we someday close demographic achievement gaps, we’ll still be left with wide talent gaps we don’t know how to address. The core concept only makes sense if there isn’t any sort of inherent Black academic inferiority, a point the book makes several times. That was in the elevator pitch! But it didn’t matter. They had a preexisting dislike for me, they wanted permission to call me a racist, and the fact that it came in the form of an account that they had absolutely no business trusting made no difference.

For the record, yes, all of this included a lot of calls on MacMillan to not publish the book, at the height of the censorious social justice era, from big-deal people with big-deal influence, and with me a first-time writer with no clout and a career in tatters. Based on 100% false claims. Of the dozens and dozens of people in the media I saw get involved in that Twitter storm, not one person - not one - has ever said “That was uncool and I’m sorry for participating.”

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The most obvious source of criticism of me is my 2017 online meltdown in 2017 in which I said terrible, libelous things about Malcolm Harris. I’ve said all I really want to say about that, but, yeah - the things I said were really bad. What I ask is that people not conveniently avoid the context, that I was once again in a destructive manic episode. My mental state does not excuse what happened or change the fact that I am responsible for the harm I caused, which was grievous. But it is relevant that I was psychotic, not to absolve me of all blame but to mitigate judgement. The usual suspects never even mention it, probably because they know it would reveal the hypocrisy of their politics around “ableism.”

Appropriately for someone who had done such a damaging and deeply unfair thing, when I got stable I again I started to set to work. I have apologized privately, I have apologized publicly, I take responsibility. I paid an immense personal and professional price for what happened. I changed my whole entire life and dug out, the hard way, with endless psychiatrist appointments, therapy sessions, and support groups. I estimate that I’ve taken maybe 25,000 pills since. I’ve been medicated and in treatment for a decade next year. I’ve raised and personally donated tens of thousands of dollars to sexual assault-related charities and still donate every month; it just feels like the thing to do. I sometimes get the impression that people think I haven’t suffered enough, but living with a psychotic disorder for a quarter century is a punishment of the highest order, trust me. It’s cost me everything I ever wanted. I sometimes get the impression that people think I haven’t felt sufficient guilt and shame; I’ve felt guilt and shame about it every day for almost a decade. I have had to save my own life from a condition that I wouldn’t wish on my worst enemy. You don’t have to find anything about this inspiring, but you do have to let me move on. It’s been nine years. Harris is off writing award-winning books. I have rebuilt a life. What is the theory of disability, public misbehavior, and forgiveness that you’re operating under, if you want me to be unpersoned forever?

It’s just really hard for to understand how progressive people, who supposedly are friends to those with disabilities, would argue that I should receive the professional death penalty for what happened. As the cliche goes, my mental illness is not my fault but is my responsibility. I’ve met that responsibility in every way I know how: with emergency mental healthcare, with psychiatry and psychotherapy, by taking so many medications, by forever changing my relationship to drugs and alcohol, by going to meetings and support groups, by adding layer after layer of accountability and supervision to my life - and, also, by accepting that my life will never be the same and that I will always face limits on what I can accomplish because of my history. And I just look at the past decade and everything I’ve had to do, and I see someone invoke my 2017 incident because they don’t like something I wrote, and I just want to ask… what is it that you think I owe you? What do you want from me?

I never did something like that before that night. I’ve never done anything like it since. Could you consider the possibility, for a moment, that I have spent much of my life deeply mentally sick, and that that condition is enough punishment itself?

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This book that I have coming out is important. It’s about a topic that’s loaded with consequences for many people, including some of the most vulnerable in our society. Its concerns have never been dealt with in quite the fashion that I’m dealing with them, in part because of the orthodoxies of our therapeutic culture. I do have the benefit of long personal experience in the mental healthcare system, years of diligent research, and strong feelings. We’re currently undergoing a reevaluation of what’s truly humane when it comes to drug use, and we need a similar reevaluation when it comes to involuntary treatment for those who cannot make rational decisions thanks to their mental illnesses. And we need to seriously confront the indisputable fact that the insatiable online hunger for identity markers has made punishing mental disorders and other disabilities vaguer, less meaningful, and harder to research and treat. The basics of diagnostic criteria for psychiatric and behavioral disorders are crumbling beneath our feet, and as the book demonstrates at length, their are victims. These conversations need to happen, and if you’ll forgive me, I’m the best person to start them.

But people in media and publishing have to be willing to let the book get a fair hearing, and this has become harder and harder for me over time. It’s a strange dynamic. On one hand, the steady and awful dismantling of the professional media has left the old status hierarchies and personal politics of that world (once the obsession of many) looking vaguely ridiculous. On the other hand, as the industry contracts some people are clutching even more tightly to those dusty concerns, and because the industry is smaller the influence of any one person at any one publication only grows. And that can result in a refusal to cover a book like All In Your Head, which in turn kills discoverability and prevents the conversations that need to happen from happening. I certainly don’t like reading negative reviews of my work, but I always appreciate it, and I would never expect anyone to hold their fire when they critique it. I’m not asking for anyone to artificially praise the book. One of the best things that could happen for the book would be for it to come under fair-but-harsh criticism. What I am asking is that the book not get brushed under the rug simply because people in the industry don’t like me for reasons that have nothing to do with the book. I don’t want special positive treatment, but I also don’t want special negative treatment. I’m also asking that people don’t lie about its contents.

I just want the book to have the chance to earn appropriate attention. I’m not demanding attention. I just want a fair chance.

Can that happen? I don’t know. The various big doo-dah publications where I could run an excerpt or be profiled are mostly in an antagonistic relationship with me now; this is mostly but not entirely my fault. I will probably hustle and pitch enough to get an excerpt somewhere with a pretty big readership, this fall, but who knows. Reviews are another question. The New York Times? I don’t think that the Grey Lady would deign to be in a feud with the likes of me, which would require the institution to be aware of my existence, and they have no reason to. But certainly individual players within the vast and federalized NYT might be pleased if the book was just sort of brushed off of their docket. I wrote a piece complaining about their bad treatment of freelancers that I know pissed some people off in the building, and I frequently have to criticize them because of their peerless influence and financial success, which invite disproportionate scrutiny. (Especially because they “don’t do media criticism,” which is a policy that conveniently allows them to evade participating in discussions about their own mistakes.) It’s also true that I complained when they let a prior head of the Books section review my second book despite preexisting beef, and he bizarrely took my decision to share my Substack deal (when people were actively calling for transparency about those deals) three years prior out of context, without any link for readers to gather the context themselves. Subsequently, they didn’t review my last book. So, you know, I’m not optimistic there.

I wrote about the Times and it’s relationship to freelancers - that is, that they don’t treat freelancers very well, and that this situation keeps getting worse as the Times becomes more and more dominant - because it was a true thing that many people were saying but felt they couldn’t say. I know many freelance writers who have complained about how badly they were treated by the NYT, but they feel they can’t do so publicly because no one can afford to risk angering the dominant commercial and cultural force in the industry. I feel obligated to say the thing out loud in those situations. And I guess I have to accept the consequences.

Granted, there’s little rhyme or reason to who gets attention or not, in establishment media. Let me whisper a little industry secret in your ear: if someone gets profiled who isn’t already legitimately famous, it’s very very often because they’re friends with the writer of the profile and that writer is doing them a favor. Connections rule. That’s how, for example, the antipsychiatry charlatans the Delanos have enjoyed fawning coverage from three of the biggest-remaining publications left in the media - they’re wealthy, privileged, and have the right friends. (Perhaps the name “Delano” clues us in to a certain proximity to power.) And so their particularly insipid and parasitic version of anti-psychiatry gets outsize attention, which has direct influence on policy. Influential people read the New York Times, The Atlantic, and The New Yorker, after all, and they have entertained anti-psychiatry over and over again without ever playing host to a muscular defense of psychiatric medicine and why it matters for people like me. This is precisely why I’m constantly complaining about the massive influence that personal relationships, nepotism, and patronage have in this industry, because they distort coverage in a way that, in turn, distorts public understanding of important issues. The Delanos have the ability to command disproportionate attention, the severely ill who benefit from psychiatry do not, and this matters. That’s why the book is necessary.

New York magazine’s vertical The Cut runs justification after justification for treating diagnoses of cognitive and developmental and psychiatric disorders as consumer goods, to be picked and chosen at whim by overeducated urban liberals who want to use them as personal branding. They publish that stuff constantly, and the pieces never seriously engage with why that practice is so destructive. And yet external criticism is essentially nonexistent, likely because The Cut is as much an example of a cool, influential, social justice-y publication as still exists, and most left-leaning writers (which is to say, most writers) probably don’t see any percentage in criticizing them. Who wants to deal with the blowback? But someone has to, given that the gentrification of disability has victims. And the fact that this task falls to people like me and others in the paid newsletter wing of media means that the criticism is siloed. It shouldn’t be. That discussion should be had, broadly, the discussion of why in fact it’s pernicious that everyone you know suddenly has a mild, photogenic case of a neurodevelopmental disorder or psychiatric condition. That’s why the book is necessary.

In contrast with all that importance, there’s the petty issue of the cone of silence about me. I am definitely not a big deal, either in this industry or outside of it. But it’s also true that this whole endeavor depends on the willingness of peers to engage with you, and my success is at least as worthy of many other writers who are regularly referred to in establishment media. My newsletter posts routinely get more views than pieces in the highest-profile establishment publications. I regularly start conversations that spill out into other newsletters and onto social media. This fall my fourth book in six years will be published by a Big Five publisher. I have written for almost every major newspaper and magazine of note in the past fifteen years. I’ve done analysis work for nonprofits, I’ve given keynotes at conferences, I’ve spoken at a dozen colleges, I’ve ghostwritten books…. And yet the effort to avoid mentioning my existence, for fear of running afoul of the hardened social rules within what’s left of media, keeps going.

For example. At some point early last year I was made aware of a piece for a high-profile pub that was going to talk about the issue of rising autism rates, how those increases are heavily concentrated among those with the least impairment, and how discussion of autism has correspondingly come to sideline the severely autistic and foreground the least-afflicted. I would be a natural person to interview for such a piece, but of course I don’t own the issue or anything. What was really weird (and why the person with knowledge of the story contacted me) is that apparently the piece was going to include the exact phrase “the gentrification of disability” without any reference to my work. And that would be bizarre. In 20 years in the business, that piece and my subsequent development of the idea have attracted more sustained and passionate attention than anything else I’ve ever written, from a wider variety of readers with a wider variety of opinions than I’ve ever received. I’ve heard from autistic people, family members of the severely autistic, special education teachers, doctors who diagnose children with autism, researchers who investigate autism, people in the autism nonprofit space, disability activists, a TikTok autism influencer, students of all kinds…. Some of the reaction has been negative, a great deal of it has been positive, it’s all been informative. The interest has been considerable, and that interest is what has made my next book possible.

I think it would be strange to run a piece about the gentrification of disability, so named, and not include a reference to my work on that topic, especially including the post in which I coined the term. I think that would be strange! I know motivated people will insist that it wouldn’t be, that I’m demanding attention or being territorial, but I just don’t find that credible given the specificity of the term. Well, the piece never came out. Writer gave up? Killed by the pub? Still coming? Don’t know. There are any number of reasons why it may not have run, but the absolute stupidest would have been if the writer and/or editors realized that they couldn’t run it without some reference to my work and felt they could not break media omerta by doing so. That would be really, really, really stupid.

I’m sorry that I frequently have to refer to conversations I’ve had with industry people who I can’t name, pieces I know of that never ran, to gossip. But media and publishing are both backchannel businesses; you can’t understand either without understanding what a huge role the whisper network plays. And I don’t want anyone to be damned by association with me, which is why I hand out praise to other people privately, in emails.

New York magazine has a daily newsletter called Dinner Party where they round up their site’s offerings for the day, add a little context or an interview, and maybe include some exterior links. I’ve subscribed since the beginning, I like the newsletter, and I like what Emily Gould has done with it since she’s come on. But. In June of 2024, I wrote a piece for New York that ran under the headline “The Case for Forcing the Mentally Ill Into Treatment.” I was very happy with the essay and I felt New York was the perfect venue. The piece did quite well in terms of pageviews, there was a long and passionate debate in the comments section, it got shared widely on social media, pieces reacting to it sprung up, I discussed it on multiple podcasts, it still gets brought up to me often. Everything that a piece by a freelancer can do for a publication, it did well. I kept my end of the bargain, including by repeatedly sharing it on Substack. And yet the piece was never linked to in Dinner Party, a newsletter that exists precisely to market work from New York and which regularly links to 300-word blog posts, the crossword, and horoscopes. Not even a one-sentence, five-or-six word reference and link.

Who might have vetoed my piece’s appearance there, I can’t say. What I can tell you is that it seems like obviously unprofessional behavior, to me. A renowned publication of that stature and quality should not be a vehicle for this shit. People have to be adults and set aside childish prosecution of petty high school politics in professional venues, or else everything I’ve ever said about media is true. The only other thing that I can say, when I think about that, is… lol.

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I took a lot of heat when I came back to writing three years (plus a month or so) after the events of 2017. But I genuinely had no choice; CUNY had fired me and I was running out of money, to the point that my ability to get medical care to manage my disorder was threatened. And listen, when it came to a job doing something else, I really tried. I applied to jobs for ten months with no success, not a single offer that came close to paying the rent. At the time I couldn’t help but note the irony: a big part of the problem was that my Google results were radioactive, and of course my biggest critics had contributed to that condition, which meant that they had helped drive me back into their world. It was my fault, of course. But that part was funny.

Lately it’s kind of felt like the same scenario. Look, I want the same thing my critics want: I want out of all this. I need to find a new way to exist in the world. I’ve opinionated too long, and it’s better for everybody if I stop being in a position where I have to have day-to-day engagement with an audience and the Online Conversation. I want very much to ride off into the sunset. Unfortunately, it turns out that you still have to pay the mortgage in the sunset, and I’m trying to figure out how to make that possible professionally. There’s a lot of things I would enjoy doing. I miss teaching college students terribly, and I would enjoy trying with another age cohort, maybe. There’s a lot of work in the broad creative world that I would enjoy trying, and I’m certainly not above miscellaneous white collar work. Who knows. My freelancing career is over; too few venues are left that will publish me. I just hope to God they’ll let me keep writing books. I’ve already built a lot of offline time into my day and week, now, and I’m generally pulling out of that whole world. But the more that people lose their minds every time my name is mentioned, the harder it is for me to build the future we both want, one with me out of this business.

Like I said, I don’t expect to change their minds; I mostly just want third parties to please not uncritically obey the demand that I be shunned. Please practice independent judgment, investigate my views yourself, and by all means, email me. But I do want to ask this of the critics themselves: what are you hanging on to this for? Why are you allowing yourself to still be moved to sudden rage by reminders of my existence? This is a broader question about what media people who came of age online from say 2005 to 2022 have to ask themselves: the industry we were a part of mostly doesn’t exist anymore, its attendant social culture is dead, and none of that is coming back. The feelings you associate with it are never coming back. And so let this weird meme hatred die with them. I am a minor figure who is very easy to avoid, an aging dad who just wants to enjoy the remaining 30 or 40 years of my life with my wife and kid, writing books. Let me go do my thing and you all do yours. The world only spins forward. As the New Agey types say of our hangups, set it free. Do us all a favor and set it free. Set me free.