How to Deal With Online Hate
Some people meditate. Some people journal. Some people pray. I’ve been known to dabble in all three. But my real spiritual practice has been posting on the internet.
Let me explain.
When I think about the last 10 years, I can think of nothing more transformative than the practice of sharing my life, my heart, and my words with people online.
Social media gets a bad rep—and with good reason. It can be toxic and cynical, addictive and tormenting. But just like with everything, there is a dark side and a light side. And if you learn how to harness this powerful tool and wield it to help you, to transform you, and nourish your growth, it’s possible for the pros to outweigh the cons.
After I published my book, I experienced deep dark burnout and eventually, depression.
I had been so open and forthcoming in my memoir and in my content on social media that when I discovered a hate thread about me, it felt like the ultimate betrayal of my trust. I had shared my heart, my words, in confidence! To my internet friends! I had believed that if I were truly vulnerable with people, then they would see me and understand. That they would “get” me.
Well, understand me — they did not.
I had to grieve my own lost innocence for a while. Sharing my life could not be a light and playful activity anymore. The fallout was real. The stakes were higher than I anticipated. For the first time ever, I became hyper-vigilant of everything I did, said, or posted online, because I was so acutely aware that people were watching. And judging. And criticizing.
But now, with some hindsight and distance from it all, I can say this: Criticism, rejection, and misunderstanding are an important part of the process.
Not just online, but in real life, too. There is a reason we fear those things. They hurt. They are uncomfortable. They make us question ourselves. And when you put yourself out there in any capacity, whether creatively or personally, you will eventually run into them.
I think what shook me most was not the criticism itself, but the confirmation of something I had always feared: that people really were watching me. That they were forming opinions about me. Misunderstanding me. Judging me.
Once I stopped trying to deny the reality of that judgment, I could finally begin building the capacity to hold it without collapsing.
Posting online is an ongoing confrontation with the self. With your desire to be understood, your fear of rejection, and your attachment to approval. What the hate thread showed me was that I’d rather hold the discomfort of knowing that some people do care, do notice, and do criticize — than walk around in denial, telling myself nobody is watching.
It's going to hurt, and you can handle it.
If you’re afraid of being rejected or judged or criticized, there’s a reason for that. It’s because it sucks. That’s just the human element of this whole thing.
If I could go back in time, I would have handled that whole discovery so differently. It might have prevented the massive spiral that happened in my mind. I wouldn’t have let it mean so much about who I believed myself to be. That’s the work.
Instead of avoiding the hard feelings, you learn to hold them. You learn to feel the sting without collapsing into yourself. You learn that someone not liking you, or misunderstanding you, or even hating you, doesn’t mean you are fundamentally bad. It just means you’ve been seen, and not everyone who sees you is going to love what they see. And you can handle that.
The mirror cuts both ways.
A hate comment isn’t where I’d ever recommend you go looking for feedback. But over the years, there have been things people have said to me that have made me consider whether I needed to look at myself more honestly. There have been comments that made me stop. That made me wonder if there was room to change my mind on something. To see a situation differently than the way I’d been seeing it. To evolve in some way I hadn’t considered before.
Just remember: feedback from your audience matters just as much as the encouragement they give you. And strangely enough, social media has helped me grow more quickly than I would have otherwise, because it has allowed me to see myself through other people’s eyes in a way I never could have on my own.
You have to learn to love it without the results.
There have been years where I’ve had insane growth — reaching 100,000+ followers, watching the numbers climb. And there have been years where I’ve grown hardly at all. The slow seasons are the hardest. They’re frustrating, tedious, thankless. Nothing seems to work. The results just aren’t there. And yet, I still feel proud of myself for continuing to post through those stretches. For rekindling my love of the game. For remembering why I started in the first place.
Yes, I want results. Yes, I want to know I’m doing a good job and making work I’m proud of. But I also do this because I love it. And I can’t get so consumed with chasing the fruits of my labor that I forget to appreciate the process — or lose touch with myself along the way.
So when I say posting on the internet is my spiritual practice, this is everything I mean. It's exhilarating and maddening. Fruitful and frustrating. It makes you stretch and grow and change in ways you won't find anywhere else. It's a mirror showing you everything you don't want to see in yourself. And if you have the courage to step up and expand your capacity to hold it all, it will transform you. If you let it.
