I left 200,000 followers on social media. Here's what happened.
It might not be what you expect.
This is the story of how I built an enormous social media following— twice— how I walked away— twice— and what it’s done for my life. Read on.
Note: a companion short film for this post will be available on my new YouTube channel later on today. If you haven’t yet subscribed over there (it’s free), head on over, check it out and hit subscribe.
Part I: Facebook
It began very simply. Back in 2016, I was running a leadership consulting company that I’d founded and built from the ground up. Four years prior, I had left a job on Wall Street, where, as a securities fraud lawyer, I’d developed fifteen years of experience with white collar crimes and civil investigations. I’d also done a fair amount of human rights work on the side.
At that time, I had a personal Facebook page with about 2000 friends, all of whom were known to me personally. Right after a certain candidate announced he was running for president, a friend of mine mentioned that there was this new feature called Facebook live, and given that i was already answering all sorts of questions at the intersection of law and politics and activism, maybe I should just hit the live button and talk.
What began simply enough as a conversation with a few friends at my dining room table on a laptop soon became a viral phenomenon. Within months, I had days where 100,000 people were watching me live as I discussed the legal implications of the new administration, and the intersection of the administration’s choices with the justice system I knew so well.
By 2018, I had 50,000 people following my page on Facebook. Five days a week, I was talking live on that platform for thirty minutes a pop. It soon became obvious, however, that due to shares of the broadcast every day in huge online activist groups, millions of people knew my name.
I was being recognized in airports, the supermarket, in front of my house. People would shout my name in my direction when I was out walking my dog in Brooklyn, and flag me down in the park when I was quietly spending time with my children. As a single mother of two young kids, the attention was scary, not exciting. Folks would approach me on the street and touch me, hug me without permission, ask for selfies, and do it all while sometimes completely ignoring the toddlers holding my hands.
But the moment where I knew that ECM the person had somehow become ECM the online celebrity was the moment where someone, recently married, recognized me while I was waiting for a flight. I congratulated her and her wife, and she started physically shaking, and was on the verge of tears, saying “I feel like I know you,” and “you’ve saved us,” and “God, I’m so nervous,” and I replied with– it’s just me.
And I realized then that “me”-- that one word supposed to sum up a self–- meant different things to people out there in the world than it did in my own home. This person in the airport, lovely as she was, had totally different ideas of who I was than what I felt was authentic and true, and many of her perceptions and my other growing legion of fans only lined up partially with the reality of my life.
I became intimately familiar with the dynamic of projection, where folks project onto a public figure all sorts of ideas about who the person is, whether true or not. I reminded people of their mother, or their favorite school teacher, or the sister they never had, or their daughter who wasn’t doing her hair right or swore too much, or their friend who couldn’t always get her lipstick straight, and all the feelings and sometimes traumas that went with that became, somehow, a part of what they saw in me.
It was a lot to carry– a huge container for a huge audience of hurting people trying to find a way through a nation’s decline– and I was not, in any way, prepared for it.
What a lot of folks didn’t know is that right before the 2016 election, I had left an incredibly toxic and destructive marriage. Our last family photo was taken on the morning of November 8, 2016, in front of my polling place, no longer his, because I had already moved out with the kids.
The insanity of my fame took off, in other words, right when I was clawing my way out of deep, nearly decade-long trauma, and I had only begun to reckon with it as the nation began its descent into more of its own.
And what I hadn’t anticipated in the early days of the weaponization of social media was how much added harm would come with a large profile on Facebook, at a moment when I was already struggling. Facebook had given me a worldwide profile, but with it came trolls who would pick apart my appearance minute by minute, bots who would question my education, qualifications, and sanity, and threats of violence against me and in some cases my children. I had stalkers. In one instance, someone posted photographs of my home online with my address, claiming that I was a grifter rather than someone who had practiced law on Wall Street and built a multi-national business before anyone knew my name.
The peak of this came in 2018 and 2019, when I was swarmed online after not responding well to demands for accountability on why my audience at that time was so white. I learned so much from that moment, and while it forever altered my trajectory as an activist, it also nearly destroyed me as a person.
Lies began to swirl about me online– with accusations about everything from my education to my marriage– some of which I now recognize in hindsight were plainly engineered to destroy my platform from the far right.
As a single mother with no support and a business that needed to support my children– already tenuous due to a vicious divorce– the constant fear of the collapse of my income due to threats to my work and life had fried every shred of my nervous system.
By the time I reached July 2019, I was completely burnt out.
On my family vacation in the Outer Banks that month, my family saw someone who was crying at the drop of a hat. During a particularly vicious spate of online harassment that week, I sat in my car and cried, while LaTosha Brown, a dear friend and legend in the voting rights space, texted me with support. She asked me if I could take six months off to heal– just disappear.
I could not, but I could do something else. I could leave Facebook.
It was a matter of days from that moment to when I moved our Broadcast to Patreon, where it still resides.
Leaving Facebook was easy. My goodbye post there was filled with hateful comments from strangers and a few former friends, and when I deleted my business and personal profiles, I felt immediately released from the viciousness of that place, the relentless harm, the targeting and the toxicity.
But while Facebook was gone, Twitter sat there waiting.
And before long, I was on Twitter non-stop.
Part II: Twitter
Twitter was a different animal from Facebook. On Twitter, the algorithm liked you if you were witty, snappy, cogent and direct with a little bit of snark and a lot of humor. In my element as a writer, I found myself immediately swimming in a big pool with a lot of public intellectuals, activists and journalists, many of whom also became instant friends.
And unlike Facebook, I found Twitter immediately addictive, particularly once I closed up shop on Facebook and went all in. I would wake up in the middle of the night, spinning with anxiety about the state of America, and there at my fingertips were friends and colleagues, also similarly not sleeping, but ready to talk.
Around this time, Apple introduced the screentime feature, and I learned in short order that on most days, I was spending upwards of six hours online, building my brand and commentary. Twitter became, in many ways, my job.
But that job too extracted a cost. Despite the immediate and exponential growth of my profile on Twitter, when I left my posts open, nameless bots would sling violent misogynist threats at me. One time, someone threatened to shoot my children in the street, and my reports to Twitter went ignored. When I closed comments, folks complained that I was being elitist or exclusionary, or that I didn’t want to hear differing opinions. There were days where it was impossible to tune out the garbage, where I would stay up at night, my anxiety vibrating on high alert, trying to figure out how to continue to fight to make a difference while holding back a tide of hate.
But I lived, ate and breathed Twitter, and found some good there too. I was there for cultural phenomenon moments I won’t ever forget, and I found solace there, and great friends, and fellow organizers and activists who were committed to making a massive difference and building a better future that was equitable for all of us.
I knew, though, as a result of my departure from Facebook, that Twitter could change, collapse even, with a few small choices from its leadership that could change its structure and impact forever.
And indeed, the acquisition of Twitter by one American oligarch in late 2022 did exactly that.
What caused me to lock my Twitter profile and leave, which I did in early December 2022, was a series of decisions by new leadership that allowed the worst white supremacist figures back on the platform, and then also opened the gates to previously banned, lesser known accounts. One of those was a woman, known where she lived for threatening public officials, who had so viciously stalked me that I had filed a cyberharassment complaint against her with the police and gone to the top levels of Twitter’s prior leadership to get her banned.
I was not down for her return, just as I was not willing to have my voice tampered in favor of those who would pay a man aligned with the worst of the far right for amplification, nor did I want to contribute content to a platform that rejoiced in the return of American neonazis.
I closed up shop, locked the door on a profile with over 145,000 followers and left.
Here’s what happened next: silence.
It took a few weeks, but one day, I woke up and didn’t check my phone. The constant barrage of others’ opinions and voices receded in my head, and all at once, there was space for other things.
I began to talk to old friends on the phone for the first time in years– long, wide-ranging conversations about life and love and this nation in which we live. I had profound, life altering conversations with family members about the future.
I found it so much easier to focus on time with my kids, and without the constant pinging of the phone that they had complained about for so long, we began to talk more deeply about their emotional needs, what was working for them at school and in life and what wasn’t, and I was better able to listen and really respond in kind.
And my conversations with fellow organizers and change-agents didn’t end, they just took on a different form. They became more intimate, more caring– more about how to create change while also taking care of ourselves and one another.
I became kinder, less hypervigilant, less prone to anxiety. Suddenly, without the constant prompt of the outrage algorithm, I was sleeping again. Suddenly, without the constant assault of strangers on my mind, my skills, my qualifications, my appearance, I was returning to the best version of myself.
In therapy, I began to finally heal from the trauma of my marriage, and could actually sit with the discomfort of the pain of what I had experienced without running off to social media to find distraction or a channel for my anger that didn’t require me to deal directly with that post-traumatic stress. I began to actually reside once again inside this body that has served me so well, for so many years, through so much harm.
And then? Then came a return of something I desperately needed: hope.
As my connections to others shifted from 280 characters to something richer and more profound, so did my relationship to what was possible.
Social media is driven by clicks and the ability to grab attention for profit. Outrage drives clicks and attention. So does just plain rage. It’s easy to feel hopeless when all you see is horror through the perfectly engineered and deeply flawed logos of the algorithm.
It is much easier, even while confronting the reality of where we are as a nation, to see love in the day-to-day work we do for one another, rather than only fear, and rage.
All around me now, instead of staring into my phone, I see beauty. The hummingbirds outside my office window while I am working. The smell of my dog’s paws as we curl up together on the couch with an actual book. The abundant green of the park near my home, where the rains this Spring have made everything verdant and floral.
And then there are the sunsets after the rain, when suddenly the world is bathed in purple and orange, where everything at once seems holy, where once and for all, it’s impossible to ignore that there are things so much bigger than us, that make clear how much damage we have done to one another, that show us by example that this world was meant for all of us, and that all of us deserve to be held in beauty, and safety, and peace.
I am better off without the algorithm. I am better off by far.
Now, does that mean that I don’t from time to time lurk on Twitter– maybe once every two weeks, to see what my favorite commentator friends are saying? Of course I do. But the difference now is that I choose how to engage. I do not feel the compulsion to pick up the phone. And I am acutely aware of when my bandwidth for horror is tiny, and I avoid what I know my body and spirit do not need to see in furtherance of obvious truths.
But what I want to say the most here is this: we do not need social media to make a difference or to find connection. We do not need to line the pockets of others with free content generated from our disgust and our fear. We can be in relationship to one another, whether intimately or in community, in ways that create safe and healthy boundaries, and more than anything, feed our souls.
I believe at this moment in time that our most important work is in caring for and creating spaces of safety for the most marginalized and vulnerable among us. I believe that it is our highest calling.
And the work of our own salvation as a nation and as a people will not be televised, and will not be streamed. It will be carried on in direct conversations small and large, and in the intimacy of private spaces, until the safety we demand becomes a larger force than those who wish to endanger us.
We’re almost there. And in the silence, if you’re listening, you can hear the roar of people rising to create a better future, where all of us are cared for and all of us are loved, one heartbeat at a time.
Have you been struggling with burnout, whether from social media or politics or just daily life under stress? Find my offerings on healing from burnout, creating a haven for yourself, and more, right here. And don’t forget to subscribe to my free YouTube channel for offerings on leadership, life, burnout and growth.
Beautiful!
You are brave, knowledgeable and a
force for good to be appreciated. Thank you for sharing your thoughts and life with us. I’ve been a subscriber since the early days of Facebook when you did daily broadcasts. Wishing you continued success in all your endeavors.