Depleted but not defeated

This morning, my father texted to tell me that he is looking forward to my next Chills column.

I sat back in dread. 

I had planned to use this second piece to dive into the kind of work I have missed doing (while doing other things at NYT) — reporting on human rights violations around the world, all while pulling back the curtain on how the journalism gets made. But…writer’s block.

It’s not something I deal with for the most part but, as I told my dad, I feel depleted. The more I thought about it, I realized I should just write about that then: what it has been like to have my name splashed across newspapers around the world, and thousands of people offering both hate and love all day long, day after day, in every i- and e-place possible.

Messages have been pouring in over Twitter, Facebook, text, phone, WhatsApp, Signal and pretty much any other messaging service that exists in 2021. Mostly, they are supportive. Beautiful. Encouraging. Kind. Many are from journalists (I thought that being part of New York media for 20 years had given me a decent amount of contact with a lot of journalists, but now I think I actually know every single one of you).

I’ll tell you a little about the not-good messages I’m also getting. I’ve written about this topic before because I am a woman on the Internet, and, because I often write about women, I am a favorite target of misogynists. (The time I co-bylined a story with Gloria Steinem in The Guardian was really fun.) Because my friends and I get so many horrifying messages from men because of our work, I just assume everyone knows that. But this week, a number of men (and a few women) have been supremely shocked to read some of the garbage I’ve been getting and wanted to know how bad it really is. I can answer that easily:

It’s bad. It’s very, very bad.

Some of them want me dead.