I get up at 7 am these days to start work. I make a cup of coffee and eat a granola bar. The walls groan in the wind outside. It’s light out, and I wish it weren’t. I wish it were still dark this time and quiet— lately things have felt really loud.
hi there! if you want to listen to this newsletter instead of read it, I’ve got you set above! I ramble a little, I expand on a lot of the ideas here and share a lot about my personal relationship to social media, and the audio quality is “recorded in the kitchen”, but nonetheless, enjoy❤️
Mornings start with the drip of the coffee maker and I log on to start work before I even have a chance to really wake up. I’m a freelancer, so mornings usually mean answering emails, making lists, writing, and doing computer tasks. The afternoons are big projects, or showing up on social media.
More and more, I’ve been writing essays, and sharing them on social media, and experiencing success with those essays. Which feels incredible— I have written and worked for so, so long to feel like a “real writer”, whatever that means, and lately that feels true more often than ever before.
It used to be that to be a writer, especially in the outdoor industry, you had to follow a pretty set path of studying the right thing in school, and then getting a masters degree, and then knowing someone, and then getting really, really lucky.
Social media has really shook up that dynamic. Now, you can self publish and promote through social media. You can have a Substack newsletter (like the very one you’re reading now), and use that to get traction as an independent writer. Through social media and platforms like this, and your own website, you can build a platform on your own, find a way into the outdoor industry by demonstrating your own value.
The internet has done this for so many creative career paths— leveled the playing field, democratized the media.
It has definitely done that for me— I wouldn’t have a platform or a job without having used social media as a tool to create one. I wouldn’t be able to work as a freelance / independent writer.
But the other thing that social media has done is completely erode the foundation of the reader-writer relationship, making it harder to function as a writer than ever before; you’re exposed to peoples opinions and thoughts on your work. They appear in your inbox, in your DMs, in a comments section. When an article does well, and says something interesting enough for people to disagree with, it’s an endless stream of the voices of people you’ve never met, trying to argue with you personally. Demanding access to you and now because they disagree with the thing that you said.
Except often times, they don’t disagree with something you actually wrote or said— they disagree with their very personalized interpretation of that and want to argue with a “well this sentence read this specific way doesn’t apply to me”.
Which leaves me, at 7:30 am, coffee still dripping endlessly into the pot silently screaming “that’s not what I said!!” into the void.
When I took my first ever writing course a professor reminded me that you are responsible for the words you write; you are not responsible for how people choose to interpret them. That is totally out of your hands and out of your control, and so it’s better to let it go.
Letting it go, I imagine, was probably easier when the people taking you intentionally out of context didn’t have a direct line to your inbox.
A few weeks back I shared a video version of the essay I wrote about leaving the Pacific Northwest (wherever you go there you are) on Instagram.
By and large the primary comment that I got, over and over again, was “sorry that you felt that way but that isn’t representative of everyone’s experience”.
Which I think is really interesting.
The video, which opens with a clear “In 2023 I packed up my life and moved to the PNW…. and I hated it so much I packed up and moved back to the Midwest after just 8 months”, is pretty clearly coded as a personal essay about my own experiences. While I do indeed touch on some of the things I didn’t really love of about the Pacific Northwest, the heart of the video is the idea that I built up the Pacific Northwest to be a fairytale in my head and that I, myself, would change in moving there.
Like most essays, I don’t say that upfront though. I don’t really get to that idea until the last half of the video, and in order to really “finish” the essay, you’d have to read the caption.
Most commenters didn’t make it that far.
And listen, it’s a long & dense piece of media for Instagram, I get that. I still think it’s tacky to comment on something critiquing it without actually viewing and considering the media in it’s entirety. That’d be like reading the first half of Dune and being like “oh it’s a white savior book”, thus coming so, so close to the point while also missing it entirely.
“I live in the PNW and there’s plenty of access to the outdoors this is such a huge generalization”
“Uhhh I feel like this definitely depends on the person”
It’s… a personal essay. Of course it depends on the person.
And listen, I’m still trying to figure out the best way, if there even is one, to share personal essays on Instagram and TikTok. It’s really hard, because you’re capped at about a minute and a half to make your point, and people don’t read captions unless you find a way to really grab them. That, and about 25% of the comments are willfully misinterpreting any point you try and make in a way that matches up with their own worldview.
It’s like social media has made us believe that all content we consume must be catered so specifically to us and our own lives, that when we see something that doesn’t match up with our worldview we feel the need to take it up with the author personally, often responding to one sentence of a piece taken wildly out of context rather than interacting with a piece as a whole.
check out this article on the viral bean soup recipe that people were legitimately asking “what if I don’t like beans? what can I substitute?” rather than recognizing that perhaps a bean soup recipe is not for them.
Which brings me to the present moment, when I received my least favorite sort of direct message— “did you see your article is blowing up on Facebook”.
Steady drip of the coffee, the room smells like morning.
what other people do with my words is not my business, I try and remind myself. Bile building in my stomach, I already know which article it is. I don’t really want to talk about it— having conversations about things that you wrote is like that. You can’t talk with everyone about it all the time.
One of my favorite things about both my partner Andy and my best friend Hannah is that neither of them read my work unless I specifically ask them to. “It would feel almost invasive”, Hannah said once. I appreciate that— writing is my job. It happens to be a very public job for me, but I don’t want to talk about it all the time. Sometimes, it’s just not that deep.
It’s this one, published in Paddling Magazine, adapted and shortened from the longer essay which appeared here, on this very newsletter. The title of it is “Women in the Outdoors are Mean Girls”—
I titled it that way very specifically because this is an email newsletter. I need a good headline for people to actually choose to read my work. Paddling Magazine kept it. As soon as they sent over the final draft I knew it was going to be a little more controversial— a lot of my more personal writing was cut out for the sake of brevity. The title certainly strikes differently in a magazine than on my personal newsletter. But hey, I wanted the publication. And I absolutely understood why they made the edits they did. I probably would’ve made the same edits if I were editing for a magazine.
To my credit, I only read the comments once, when there were just two of them. It seems to me that most of the issue taken is with the title, and a people are arguing with that alone, despite that I never at all say all outdoorsy girls are mean girls, rather “hey the outdoors is a really exclusive club already, what are some changes we and mostly I could make to make it more inclusive?”.
The other category of complaints is what one might call “I see myself in this essay and I don’t like it”. The essay, you may recall, is mostly about things I have done and how I can do better. Reading it and reaching the conclusion "well I say this thing the author calls is toxic and I am not a mean person and so this whole article is garbage” has big if the shoe fits energy. I actually really like those comments. What unabashed level of inability to self-reflect.
Funny enough, I got mostly positive comments on this essay here on Hello Stranger, likely due to increased context, but even more on Instagram, which is usually not what I experience.
I think on Instagram I got just one comment that said “let’s not pretend that outdoorsy women are all mean when this is obviously just your experience”. (To which I of course replied, yep! This is a personal essay, it’s just my experience. BUT I do think, based on all the other comments here, that this is a trend that is happening, and is shutting others out of the outdoors).
There is a third category of critique on this essay, and it’s this one I actually find the most interesting.
One of the comments I happened to read included the phrase “I find it really hurtful that Paddling Magazine would publish a piece like this and so close to international women’s day”.
I find it really telling that women in the outdoor industry, particularly women at a higher level who have been in the field a while, find critique of culture to be inherently sexist, even when it is coming from inside the house. (Me, I’m inside the house).
It is not good feminism to act as though women and the way we treat each other is beyond reproach.
It is not inherently harmful to talk about the harm women can and do perpetuate.
If women in the outdoors refuse to be critiqued, as if all critique is inherently sexist especially on topics such as making the outdoors a more welcoming place, then we need to really examine who it is exactly we aren’t critiquing, and who it is that is hurt and excluded by these women becoming irreproachable. If the majority of the women in the outdoors at higher levels are white, and the majority of the women often explicitly or implicitly excluded are women of color, then labeling all cultural critique as “sexist” only works to further keep the outdoors an exclusive place—
In short, we perpetuate that the outdoors are primarily for white men and the women adjacent to them.
White women at these high levels (myself most certainly included at times, I am working on it!) will use this sense of victimhood as a shield from critique rather than engage with the idea that we have room to improve and make the outdoors more inclusive.
That is not feminism.
But I understand how we got there.
For women 10, 20 years older than me especially, respect in the outdoors was hard earned. The seat at the table was fought for. After fighting so hard for that seat at the table, it is hard to then be told to turn around and help another person up, especially when no one else around you is doing it.
You earned your place— why should you have to share it?
Doesn’t that silly, young, kayaking writer know how hard women just ten years ago fought to be where she is? How damaging critiques of women can be to impressions of women in the industry as a whole?
I do.
But preserving the place, face, and power of the women who have already made it in outdoor spaces is not more important than making sure that the space is safe and welcoming for others to make their way into as well.
a list of things I did this week other than slowly lose my mind over comments and emails!!!
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