There it was. Secrets and feelings I was, at one point, certain would never leave the safety of my journal were displayed on the front page of a newspaper for all 50,000 students at my school and whoever else chimed in to The Michigan Daily’s postings to see.
I was terrified. Actually, terrified was an understatement. I spent at least an hour trying to bring myself down from a stress-induced panic attack when I realized exactly what I’d done. After a gut-wrenching breakup during my first semester at college, I decided to write about it as my first piece for The Statement, The Daily’s long-form magazine. I knew that this experience was relatable — most people get broken up with at some point in their lives, and navigating this as a college student was nothing short of normal. But, if this shared occurrence among 20-somethings was so relevant, why was I so scared to talk about it?
The power of relatability is not lost on me. Writing is, at its core, a way to connect the human race in one way or another. People find comfort in seeing themselves reflected in the pages, blogs and poetry they read. The human condition: Loving, losing and every emotion in between is shared by all 7.8 billion of us. This thought comforted me when I gave my editors the “go ahead” to publish the piece I’d written. What I’d failed to consider, though, was that as writers, when we share these incredibly vulnerable experiences, we open ourselves up to criticism and, if we’re lucky, praise from our audience.
College students, specifically, are just growing into themselves during the four years we spend at university. Our frontal lobes are still developing and we are all, whether we’d like to admit it or not, desperately trying to figure ourselves out. The formation of our opinions and morals depend largely on who and what we surround ourselves with.
I knew that because the University of Michigan fosters such a diverse population of students, it is bound to accumulate an equally diverse population of opinions, and that not all responses to my piece would be positive. Just because the piece was relatable didn’t mean that people wouldn’t think I was batshit crazy for printing the intimate details of how I coped with this loss. My friends and I laugh about it now, but at the time, I believed that people might genuinely think I was psychotic.
Upon the publication of this piece, much to my shock, I found it on The Daily’s “Most Read” column the very next morning. I got several texts from my editors wishing me “congratulations!” and even more Instagram DMs and an influx of emails of girls saying that “They needed to hear that it would all be okay.” I felt good. I was ecstatic (or at least as ecstatic as I could be) that my heartbreak could be shared among my peers, and that the moral of the story was truly resonating with people.
However, there was one response among all of the rest that shook me to my core. It was from an unidentifiable burner account that had swiped up on my Instagram story, where I engaged in some shameless self-promotion of the column. The DM read something along the lines of: “this is wild bruh. didn’t realize it was acceptable to air out your personal business online now.” I wanted to fire back some witty, powerful response that “the column wasn’t about the breakup, but the lessons of girlhood I learned from it!” Whatever happened to female empowerment? I thought to myself in a fit of keyboard-warrior-esque rage. And, seriously, who uses the term “bruh” in a hate comment?
While I was able to laugh off this absurd comment in the moment, it nonetheless affected me later. I’d worn my heart on my sleeve and felt it being tossed right back in my face. I felt like I was going to throw up. I hadn’t expected to get backlash for something that seemed so universal, but criticism is inevitable, and there it was, right in front of me. Whatever high I was riding from the excitement of my first piece quickly vanished and was replaced with a sort of dread. If I was going to continue centering my pieces around relatability and honesty, what else would get thrown at me? How serious could the hate become?
The reality of hate and negativity in response to deeply personal and thought-provoking pieces is an issue and experience shared widely by the writers of the digital generation. Juan Rodriguez, a columnist for the Albion Pleiad, shared his experience with negativity and straight-up hate he’s received on his pieces.
“I think the big (hate comment) that always comes to mind that got a really big reaction was in an article I wrote for the Detroit Free Press a couple of months ago,” Rodriguez said. “Some guy, I don’t know who, sent me a fucking letter, like an actual physical letter. It was genuinely the funniest thing I’ve ever seen. He said something along the lines of ‘that I am someone who’s been indoctrinated into woke ideology.’ He was making all these assumptions about me. The thing that really got me was how badly written it was. I couldn’t take it seriously.”
Rodriguez, however, has learned to cope with the negativity: “I know very much who I am, and I’m very comfortable in my identity. That makes it easier to differentiate between criticism that is mean and criticism that is good and valuable,” Rodriguez said. “The hate kind of just bounces off of me. … I’m surrounded by people who love and support me — people who are very conscious of who they are and who I am. A stranger’s approval means nothing to me when I have these amazing people.”
Criticism is bound to happen, and the reality is that none of us can escape it. Whether that be through a snide comment left by a professor on a paper you turned in for your first-year writing requirement or a nasty response to a piece written about how a breakup taught you to cherish the female friendships in your life; we all have to face criticism at one point or another. I’ve fortunately come to realize that it’s not the criticism that matters, but what you decide to do with it instead.
I could’ve chosen to cower. I could’ve chosen to write about run-of-the-mill topics like, I don’t know, the weather or how the Markley Dining Hall exclusively serves chicken (can’t they ever switch it up?), but that’s not what I did. Sure, I had a lot to say about almost everything in my life, and I, in theory, could write an entire column on the monotony Markley, but that’s not me. I want to connect with people on a level deeper than small-talk topics, and to me, relatability and honesty are the ways to do so.
I went on to write about femininity and then about what it means to be a writer. I tried to take experiences that I had lived or was living through and turn them into something that people could see themselves in — experiences our readers might have had, too. My intent for people to see themselves reflected in my pieces was evident, and people reached out to me to tell me so. Every positive email from a heartbroken young woman or premed-student-turned-writer made the handful of nasty comments I’d gotten fizzle away.
Writing and relatability go hand in hand. The poets might argue that these shared emotions and lived experiences we all deal with are, at our core, what makes us human. The works that have survived the testament of time revolve around love, loss and the triumphs and tribulations of the human condition, not the hateful remarks that surely surfaced in response. This is why our curricula involve Jane Austen and Sappho and not a scroll from GreekH8er24.
Although I’m sure the writers we might consider “The Greats” took their critics’ opinions with a grain of salt, it’s also important to note that we might have something to learn from our “haters.” Relatability is subjective, and just because what we write might resonate with a few, we’re bound to leave a bad taste in someone’s mouth eventually. And if we learn nothing at all from the response to our work except how to get back up when we are inevitably knocked down, I’d say the writers might have one on the critics.
Statement Columnist Anna McLean can be reached at agmclean@umich.edu.