FIRST THINGS SECOND

In which I talk about where I’ve been, and ruminate on writing for an audience.

I need to back up.

When I sent my first letter to this list – which at the time, had zero subscribers – I shared the link with my dear friend Marianne Kirby via text message, adding the comment “*roars like a wounded animal, clicks send*”, because 1) I grew up in the early internet and still occasionally bend to the silly convention of narrating action between asterisks and 2) personal writing is PAINFUL and EMBARRASSING. Even when I am sending it to literally no one. It is painful and embarrassing that it exists in the first place.

I am, fortunately, a person who has become adept at being vulnerable. The older I get, the more experience I get, the more confidence I get, the more comfortable I am with vulnerability. Some of this is a factor of just outpacing my own trauma; or, as my therapist has occasionally reminded me in times of strife and angst, “You’ve survived so many incredible challenges already; you’ll survive whatever this is.” (I think “incredible challenges” is therapist code for “extreme bullshit”??) But some of it is also just sheer force of will. I am always chasing more strength – both in the “picking things up and putting them down” sense, and in the Strength-as-tarot-card sense, which is more a flavor of influence and persuasion than brute force.

In 2011, I was working – if you could call it working – in graduate studies admissions for a b-grade university in Boston, Massachusetts. I spent most of my days listening to ill-gotten music mp3s, and writing for my blog, and moderating a plus size fashion community on LiveJournal. Which is to say, I did not do a lot of the work they paid me for. On occasion I was a person who secretly threw away long-overdue accumulated paperwork rather than data-enter it. I only did this a couple times. Definitely more than once. Shrug, I don’t know where those forms went? So mysterious! I was bad at my job, which was fine with me, because I hated it. 

I started freelancing for the launch of a women's media / personal essay website called xoJane, which was the new project of Jane Pratt, the woman responsible for Sassy magazine, an iconoclastic and legendary outsider teen magazine that powerfully influenced my youth and ultimately my writing style as well. One day in the summer of 2011, after a few months of freelancing, Jane herself wanted to talk to me. I made an excuse to leave my desk, and ran upstairs to an empty classroom to take the call in secrecy. Jane and I did not chat for very long before she offered me a full time job as an editor at xoJane. 

I did what you’re supposed to do when a job offer comes through – I asked to think about it for a couple of days. The whole conversation lasted maybe fifteen minutes. Jane hadn’t even seen a resume. I hadn’t written a cover letter. I wasn’t expecting to find a different job. And here one was.

I must have felt excitement. I don’t really remember it though. I remember, in my way, being very ambivalent about this decision. Online media was hardly a secure industry, and my pragmatic side was hyperaware that I could very well accept this job and then see the site go tits up within the year. The job I had was secure. It’s pretty difficult to get fired from higher ed administration without literally breaking the law. The job I had… was secure. I was secure in my absolute misery flowing in its predictable patterns day in, day out, nothing changing, paperwork data entry paperwork data entry paperwork, forever.

I took the job. Obviously. That’s how a lot of you know me. The site didn’t go tits up, well, not within that first year. The site became fucking infamous. I realized fairly early on that I had virtually zero oversight and could publish anything I wanted, as long as people clicked on it, and I leveraged that freedom into a focused and aggressive campaign to put as many fat, queer, trans, and POC voices on a loudspeaker as I possibly could. And what a loudspeaker it was — the reach of xoJane dwarfed my reach as a blogger, and it was a dizzying amount of power.

I left my role there in 2016, having ascended to Deputy Editor, which still boggles me as a person who arrived at xoJane with absolutely zero editorial experience, and frankly who approached the job with every bit of the clueless enthusiasm you would expect from an idealistic activist who had no idea what she was doing. 

As you might guess, if you were following xoJane in this era, the experience came with an enormous amount of trauma – some of which was generated from my own missteps, but a lot of which came from the relatively new sport of internet trolling. Like most fat women on the internet, I got my death threats, but I also got a constant low-level drone of feedback that I was garbage and everything I did was garbage. I don’t want to make it sound like it was all bad, because it wasn’t all bad; I’m very proud of so much of the work I put into the world in this era of my professional life. But writing as yourself – it puts you in a blinding spotlight. 

As I said above, personal writing is PAINFUL and EMBARRASSING and it never became less of either, however long I did it. I developed an extreme vigilance about what was being associated with my name. Everything I wrote happened under my own byline, which means I scrutinized every single word for weak points a commenter might zero in on, to attack me with. I never wrote anything without hours of painstaking deliberation over each sentence, considering every possible way it could be read and received by an audience. I did this even with the work I edited, because I knew if a piece of writing blew up in a bad way, not only the writer would suffer – which would also be my fault – but so would I, for being the one to put that work out there in a non-airtight state in the first place.

I’m getting very inside baseball here, but this is the important bit: I was very accustomed to being personally, acutely responsible for every word I wrote into existence. It all happened under my name. People knew it was me. And they knew exactly who to come down on if they read something that made them angry. It was me. 

I left xoJane – which is a story unto itself – in absolute exhaustion. I have spent most of my life in a state of hypervigilance and that job hooked into that ability (it’s not a superpower, it’s a fucking burden) and dragged me into a space where living that way was normalized. When I left, it was to save my own life. (This will be a theme of this era.)

For the first time in my life I had quit a job without another job lined up. But I am blessed, somehow, probably undeservedly, with an ability to be in the right place at the right time and with a prodigious capacity for saying YES to things even when I don’t know what is being offered because I have never been offered it before. Within a month, one Joel Hodgson, creator of Mystery Science Theater 3000, another towering influence on my childhood self and on my writing voice, had called to ask me to write for the Netflix reboot of his show. This call didn’t come from nowhere – I had been in communication with Joel for awhile at that point, leading up to the series’ revival – and how all that happened is also a story unto itself. But Joel called and then suddenly I was going to write comedy for Netflix. Joel didn’t ask to see my resume either.

Writing for an episodic series is extremely different from writing for a website. Suddenly I was working collaboratively with a group of writers, most of whom were far more experienced than I was, to create a script, and my name was but one of many in a list of contributors. This was a revelatory experience, and exactly what I needed in that moment. I’d spent five years obsessing over every word I put to a page; now I could say literally anything and in the finished result, no one would know it was me. I could say absolutely grotesque things in the name of comedy and NO ONE KNEW. The freedom of it! What a joy.

For the last seven years, I have worked on and off for this wonderful, brilliant universe called Mystery Science Theater 3000 – as a writer, and in so many other roles I won’t begin to list them here. I am not going to share a bunch of info on my current job here – you can get that by paying attention to the show, which I recommend to you given that I do, in my biased way, think it is a very good show. But my point is that I’ve spent seven years writing things no one knew I had written. At first this was a real challenge to rise to – most writers have an understandable need to TELL EVERYONE what they wrote, to get that sweet, sweet recognition from an adoring public for things we have done very much in private. Given my background it was additionally hard, because at xoJane, while I got regularly gutpunched for things I wrote that people didn’t like, I also swam in palatial oceans of praise from strangers for the things I wrote very well. But at MST3K, the goal is to make a good show as a collective, not to aspire to shine one’s own star above everyone else’s. I also know this is not normal in this industry, but it’s how we do things, for the most part, and I think it’s fantastic.

Excepting a couple of articles for Lifehacker last year, I haven’t written under my own byline in a very, very long time. So. Back to the start. I sent my first letter to this list, with its zero subscribers. And then, almost as an afterthought, I shared the link to my Instagram stories. And something happened that I hadn't actually prepared for: a whole bunch of you SUBSCRIBED. 

I didn't think this through. I didn't think about the possible outcome of people still caring about anything I have to say. Still. After I’ve been gone from public view for so long. I know, intellectually, that many of you have followed me on social media for years after first meeting me on xoJane, or even before that, via Fashionista or Two Whole Cakes. And still, I kind of assumed no one would subscribe, or perhaps some friends would subscribe, out of pity, but no one would actually read. 

I ask myself, why does having an audience matter? In my current job, I get to work with a lot of performers, so I have a lot of reminders on a regular basis how much not-a-performer I really am. Performers have this… thing. I don’t want to call it insincerity, because it’s not that, and everyone I know who does this kind of work is almost painfully earnest at times. But there is a sharp awareness of being “on” or having the capacity to be “on” at any moment, it feels almost primal, like a squirrel racing through treetops in a forest, constantly scanning six branches ahead for the next landing. Even if you’re just trying to make your friends laugh, that’s a kind of performance, isn’t it? Performers have very little chill. Making someone laugh is a huge power move, so I kind of get it. You’re compelling someone not only to have a feeling they didn’t expect, but to have a physical reflex to it. There’s a real intensity to that.

What I do have in common with performers, and in common with writers, is that even whilst I am awash in self-doubt, I still do love the sound of my own voice. I love using that voice to move people. And I have just enough confidence – we won’t call it arrogance – to believe my voice is worthy of being heard, or read, as the case may be. 

And yet… when so many of you subscribed, I was shocked. There was fear, as well. It was a strangely nostalgic feeling. Has it been long enough that I can do this again? Have I had enough therapy – I only started therapy shortly after quitting xoJane – by now? Can I tell you things without obsessing over your reaction? That’s the real goal here. I mean, the goal is to entertain you. But the goal is also to reconnect with the part of myself that talks to you, as myself.

Until the next one, which may be about, I don’t know, my obsession with making the perfect hardboiled egg or it may be about the brutal experience of divorce, I guess we’ll find out.

Thank you.

Lesley