Fear

Fear is just you trying to keep you safe

Dear Writer,

I am afraid.

Of you.

Some of you have been with me for years, or even decades, and if that’s the case, you probably already know why I might feel this way. But some are new, and I need to tread this battered footpath again so that I can get my head straight around it.

Over the years, I’ve built a number of communities, and then abandoned them at various times when things started to really grow, because I don’t like attention. I don’t like being at the center of any group, let alone one I pulled together doing the work I like to do.

I don’t like things being about me. Even my work.

But I do love doing the work, which means I love reaching audiences and inspiring people to write and be creative and just live their lives with as much fun as possible. But when the numbers start climbing and I start seeing success, I pull this classic move.

Some years ago, I built a small online following while I wrote a blog about my divorce from my kids’ dad. Being openly myself, the same big fucking mess in public and private, has been a big part of who I have always been, and I think it’s also what has drawn people to me. Unfortunately for Fish—that’s the nickname I gave my kids’ dad on that blog—that meant that I wrote about my life, which was also his life. He has forgiven me, I have forgiven him, and Fish remains one of the most precious and beloved people in my life.

Anyway, as bad luck would have it, I met a man through that blog; he was one of the community that formed around me while I wrote my vulnerable experience every day. He had been romancing—I found this out later—a number of women in that community that was mostly women, so when we announced our relationship, things went a little sour. Those women, instead of informing me of his shenanigans, just disappeared from the community, and I do not blame them at all. You try pointing out a field of red flags to a person standing in the intoxicating glow of a nuclear love-bomb.

Actually, don’t. It’s pointless, and no good can come of it.

About a year later, after I’d married this new man, he was suddenly not so hot on me sharing my personal life anymore; cockroaches don’t like the light. I stopped the blog, and that community turned on me HARD. They still gather on Facebook with the group name I gave them, and they still won’t have anything to do with me. And honestly, I don’t care. I was a mess back then. Maybe I deserved it. I still love them. I hope they are well.

I wasn’t comfortable with fame and attention before that, but since that experience, I became even more tentative.

The biggest following and audience-building success I’ve ever had was while I was married to this same man, someone who has not been officially diagnosed as a sociopath, but whose narcissistic behaviors and emotional violence resulted in me being diagnosed as suffering from narcissistic/sociopathic abuse so… take from that what you will.

Anyway, he loved the attention and fostered it and adored when people adored him and he built a big following, a big community. I got to show up and do the work I wanted to do and pull my Homer Simpson routine; he built the community and bathed in the attention.

It was toxic, but it worked.

When he finally selected a new victim from that adoring following, and escalated the ways he tormented me so I would look crazy and he would look like he had no choice but to flee the wild Bertha of his own making, he doused me, my kids, and the rest of my life in gasoline, tossed a match out the window as he drove by, and bounced.

Because we had a fairly large following, all of this happened in public. The vast majority of the people following us saw right through him before I even did. I still have emails from concerned listeners from when we were still married, which I had ignored because I was convinced through the abuse that my husband was wonderful and any problems we had were because of my essential failings as a person.

But this community, for the most part, was having none of that shit, and they were on it. They were writing posts about him and going to blogs to gossip about what happened, and researching him, and finding information about him on the internet that I didn’t even know. For years, if you did a Google search¹ on me, that fallout is what you would find.

I am still recovering from all of that, and I’ve recently realized that even when a community loves you and has your back, it can be terrifying. They all meant well and they were really helpful in getting me to realize that maybe the problem wasn’t me, but having people publicly dissect your life while people from his family and his past are reaching out to you with horrific stories about the person you shared a bed with for six years…

I don’t know that I’ll ever fully recover from that. Even with the vast, vast majority of people being firmly on my side, I felt unsafe in that environment, like a well-meaning person was going to pop out from behind a corner at any moment with proof that this man that I had loved and had brought into my home with my children was also the Scranton Strangler.

It was a nightmare.

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The predictable result

After all of this, I rebuilt my life. I created another podcast network that did really well… until I abandoned it. I loved doing the work, but I was terrible about building community, so I pulled a Homer.

I built a TikTok channel. It got almost to 1,000 subscribers—which is where things start happening on TikTok—and I ghosted.

I created this newsletter, Dear Writer. It started to grow, people started recommending it… and I disappeared.

Why?

Fear.

That’s it. It’s that simple. I am afraid.

Of you.

Fear is just you trying to keep you safe.

I have been suffering from a huge bout of depression for the last couple of weeks. This is not typical of me; I have a decidedly Tiggerish energy. Even when things are very, very bad, as they were during the couple of years after the not-diagnosed-as-a-sociopath person torched my life, I still managed to bounce. I hid in my work for a few years there, which was the only place were I felt like myself, until I started to come back sometime in mid-2019. But all of the bad stuff was happening in late 2016 leading up until New Year’s Day of 2017, a time during which certain world events became heavily associated with what he’d done to me.

This year, I sat with my current husband holding my hand and had to repeat over and over again, “He’s not here. He’s not part of my life. He has no power over me. He can’t do that to me again,” until I realized that the horror I was feeling the last time the country lost its goddamned mind had very little to do with national events.

But still. Here I am after two weeks of barely being able to get out of bed, just because for about a half an hour, I was re-living the most traumatizing experience of my life.

As of this morning, I’m almost fully recovered. But it wasn’t until this morning, as I was waking up thinking about my late-year promotional run where I must put myself on social media in order to let people know about the amazing Year of Writing Magically workshop being open for applications now, that I realized why I struggle to engage with my community.

With you.

I’m afraid of you.

And that’s stupid because you’re fucking lovely.

The way forward

Look, here’s the thing. In order to do the work I love to do—talking about stories, teaching writing, and writing novels—I need you. I need all of you. I need you in my corner, I need you by my side, and that means I need to be by your side.

I would love to do that. It takes a very particular kind of person to follow me. You must be curious, creative, kind, patient, and willing to indulge my annoying liberal tendencies, like wanting everyone to feel seen and welcome and safe in my spaces.

So, if you’re here, you’re likely that kind of person. I don’t play coy with my values, so that cuts out a lot of people from my communities and leaves me with you. You know. The better ones.

Am I safe with you? I think about as safe as I’m gonna be with anyone.

But it’s only now that I’m realizing that my fear is not about you. What happened last time happened because of what he did, and because I had a community of wonderful people who had my fucking back. That was an amazing, magical gift, and I am grateful. I have always been.

But I’m still scared, because Fear and Reason are not typical bedfellows.

The thing is, he doesn’t matter. As a person, he doesn’t. The mark of what he did to me will always linger on my soul. That’s how trauma works. But if I’m going to move forward, I need to acknowledge that mark and realize that the communities didn’t do anything to me.

He did.

And he’s gone.

I can have community, and be safe. I can do my work in public, and be safe. I can be myself, and create a space where you all can be yourselves and we can just do this thing.

That is the truth.

My fear doesn’t know that’s the truth yet.

But it will.

Everything,

L

1. I am asking you, as a personal favor, please don’t Google or try to find out what happened. If you do, I get it, but please, please, please, don’t mention him or any of that stuff in the comments. I need to talk about it to get past it, but I’m shaking even as I write this because talking about him makes me panic. You can best support me by behaving as though he doesn’t exist.