The Words I Will Not Say

I've been trying to write a version of this post for fifteen years. I've always been too afraid to hit "publish."

This is a fairly intense one, so let’s start with some light housekeeping. First, I’m still working out the best rhythm for sending out newsletters given that I cannot stop putting up posts (omg I missed itttt) — but also don’t want to clog up your inboxes. So just be aware that I post directly to my Substack multiple times a week. If you’re looking for stuff to read, check in once in awhile.

A few recent (free) posts:

• Let Me Blow Your Mind

• The Absolutely Most Disgustingest Spots In My House

• Bagel Snob

If you want access to the full (and constantly-expanding) archive and paid subscriber content, you can subscribe monthly or annually — or, if you feel strongly about supporting independent writing and want to make my day, you can become a Founding Member (I have a special surprise coming for Founding Members very soon).

Second, I did a two-part episode of my dear friend Brandon Renken’s podcast Unlawful, in which we discuss everything from the very singular legal issues faced by content creators (a topic relevant to the below post, incidentally) to that time that I worked with the FBI to take down a Moroccan hacking ring (yes). You can watch (or listen to the audio-only versions) of the episode here.

Alright, moving on. I’ve started versions of this post — about the severe and life-altering online harassment I dealt with for years — a thousand times dating all the way back to 2010, but I’ve always hesitated to hit “publish.” So why now?

Because a few days ago I read an article by Polly Vernon detailing experiences that mirrored my own practically verbatim — and the feeling of knowing it wasn’t just me…look, even though I *know* that, it’s hard to find people who’ve experienced something similar and especially want to talk about it. I get it. It’s painful, you’re scared that saying the words out loud will bring them back like Voldemort, and — worst of all — you worry that someone you care about (or even someone you don’t) will find those words and believe them to be true.

Harassment — online or otherwise, and I’ve experienced both in spades — can be an intensely isolating experience, and there is a special kind of peace that comes from someone acknowledging that what happened to you was real, and cruel, and deeply damaging…because they’ve felt it, too. They know. So perhaps reading about what happened to me will be interesting (or even helpful?) to some of you.

I dunno. Let’s find out!

For over a decade, I was one of the targets of a particularly vicious group of online trolls called “GOMI”, or “Get Off My Internets,” headed by one Alice Walker Wright (you’ve only heard of it, or her, if you traffic in certain highly specific corners of the internet). She created the site right around when I started blogging, and at first I was the primary target — the site was called “Reblogging Ramshackleglam” for a minute, during which Alice posted daily missives about whatever I was doing (using my full name as often as possible so that her posts would show up in my Google results), with the obvious intent of having her readers come after me personally both on her channel and on my own.

GOMI is still (I think?) technically around as a forum-type site, and they’ve long since become bored with me, which has been nice. The only time I’ve really thought about them in the past few years was when blogger Heather Armstrong (a.k.a. Dooce, and one of Alice’s favorite targets) died by suicide in 2023, and I could not stop crying. While I understand the depth and complexity of mental illness well, I also understand what it feels like to be on the receiving end of the kinds of relentless, years-long attacks that Alice orchestrated, so…let’s just say I certainly hope it keeps her up at night. Anyway, I put up an IG post to that effect, resulting in her blocking me (Piper, nooo!), but other than that the community has been wonderfully absent from my headspace for years.

That said, what they did to me — and others like me; mostly young women trying to carve out a living in the lifestyle space — had consequences. Real ones. All Alice had to do was post about something I’d done — it could be as innocuous as a recipe I’d posted — and her commenters were on it, tearing down my parenting, my looks, my marriage, my friendships, my literal worth as a human being. She reserved particular ire for pregnant women and new mothers, using the charming turn of phrase “shitting out a baby for content” with remarkable frequency.

Two of hundreds of examples posted under Alice’s handle, “PartyPants” (I know):

Nothing gets older faster than listening to someone whine repeatedly and with no end in sight about how not shitting out a kid is the most horrific tragedy to ever befall anyone, ever, at any historical point in the earth's existence.

If you just wanted to raise a kid, there are kids out there to raise and a hundred ways to get your hands on them. Just admit you don't want to take in some mutt from another bloodline and be done with it.

It must be noted that the vast majority of PartyPants’s readers were women, many of whom loudly considered themselves feminists but seemingly saw nothing dissonant in their participation in GOMI.

More feminist commentary posted in response to my miscarriage:

(Image via this Reddit thread.)

For a time the members of this community were, in some ways, my most dedicated readers. They consumed everything I wrote in search of opportunities for ridicule, and so they knew everything about me…which meant they knew precisely how to hit me where it would hurt the most. Imagine, for a moment, if on a daily basis you got told — IN ALL CAPS — that the very worst things you’ve ever thought about yourself were incontrovertibly true?

For the most part, my career was only impacted insofar as the strain on my mental (and ultimately physical) health; they would occasionally contact brands I worked with to try to (unsuccessfully) damage the contracts, but that was it.

Then, in 2014, my first book came out — and shit got real.

A promotional shot for the book release that probably didn’t help

The moment — and I do mean the moment — that the Amazon listing for my book went live, the one-star reviews courtesy of a post Alice had written ridiculing the release (and directing them to the Amazon page) came pouring in. Now, I’m not under any illusions: The book is (I think) kinda sweet in an early-blogosphere way — and it was certainly well-intentioned — but there was plenty to legitimately dislike about it. I’d say, “I’m sure there are many people who did not like my book,” but that would imply that many people ordered and then read my book, which they did not. (Later ones did well, though!) No no, this wasn’t a few critical readers; this was an actual hailstorm of this-is-the-worst-book-ever reviews, the bulk of which were posted before anyone could have reasonably even accessed the damn thing.

Matters were made dramatically worse when, after a couple of days of what I have to imagine was “unusual” activity, Amazon removed a couple of the reviews for having violated their terms of service (basically, you can say things like “this book sucks” but you can’t say things like “this author is a hideous whore” or whatever). I had expected a couple of especially enthusiastic members of the GOMI community to post harmful reviews to some extent, sure, and had more or less come to terms with it. But when I saw that a couple of the reviews had been taken down…that’s when I started to panic.

Why did the removal of the reviews spin me out? Because that’s like Lesson 1 in Life On The Internet: If you try to prevent people from writing whatever they want to write about you, they will make it their life’s mission to prove that they CANNOT BE SILENCED. (Basically: don’t feed the trolls — with the caveat that it’s absolutely fine to defend yourself or otherwise engage with legitimate criticism; more on that in a moment.)

When these reviews were taken down, on the day I turned 33 years old, that’s exactly what happened — I clearly had an inside track to Bezos himself, they wrote, and my phenomenal cosmic power MUST BE STOPPED! (If I had an inside track to literally fucking anything at Amazon, I would be in Tahiti right now, just saying.)

I spent my birthday in a state of absolute hysteria, believing that my life as an author (or as a writer, period) was over. Every time I clicked over to my book’s Amazon page (which of course I couldn’t stop myself from doing), I’d find a new diatribe or ten about just how terrible of a writer (and person) I was — and yes, one-star reviews, especially when posted right at the launch of a book, have an actual effect on Amazon’s algorithm; it’s called “torpedoing.” Besides, if you’ve ever been subject to reviews, you already know that the nice ones la-la-la their way through your head. The bad ones, though? Those are forever: The crueler they are, the more indelibly they lodge in your brain.

They were basically criticizing everything about Jordan - how she looked, her marriage, her parenting, her education, how she dressed and styled herself, what sponsorships she chose to take, and rumored things she did in the past that weren’t relevant to the blog at all…hateful toward her just for existing.

Via this Reddit thread

Now, I get how the Internet works and by now have a pretty nuanced and robust comprehension of online “hate” culture, but please understand: Writing a book had been my dream since I was four years old, and this particular incident hurt more than…well, more than almost anything I’d ever experienced.

I couldn’t eat. I couldn’t sleep, not even for a minute. I felt like there was a huge crowd of people standing in a circle around me screaming I HATE YOU into my face over and over and over. I cried so much I was vomiting. Oh, and I was six months pregnant, so this was both understandable and completely untenable. I booked an emergency mental health appointment for the very next day — which was actually great, because it got me onto much-needed medication for the anxiety and depression I’d suffered from my entire life. Still, though: I wish had arrived at that place in a different way.

A quick bit of backstory, so that I communicate to you the extent to which I am not a delicate flower when it comes to other people’s opinions of me, and understand the difference between criticism and harassment well. As an example, I once personally broke the internet (by deciding that I simply had to post about my impressions of race relations in rural Arkansas) (in 2015) (oh you heard me right), and the response, while obviously upsetting, was also…ah…legitimate, and in many cases thoughtful enough that it resulted in real learning. That is criticism.

I also have extensive experience with harassment, starting in the fourth grade, when I became the focal point of a group of students absolutely hell-bent on making my life miserable, to the point that I had to switch schools a couple of years later. Then, of course, I was harassed in a different way at the new school, too.

I don’t love the word “bullying”; to me there’s a faintly schoolyard quality to the word that makes it feel less legitimate when applied to adults. But semantics aside, the feeling is one I know well, and one that shaped my life in ways that echo to this day. With all this experience you might think that as an adult I’d know better than to take the eviscerations of strangers to heart — and who knows, maybe our collective EQ has evolved to the point where if I were a new blogger experiencing this, I’d have more perspective. But as hard as I tried not to let it affect me, I couldn’t manage it. During the peak of GOMI’s fixation on my site, I can tell you with absolute certainty that lasting damage was inflicted. What I dealt with as a child paled in comparison.

The emails and comments were almost always anonymous, and at first it was sort of exciting that people even cared what I was doing, but very quickly it became an Olympic-level masochistic event. I read all the posts, soaked in page after page of the commentary of strangers. My heart pounded every time I published a piece that I thought they might find interesting enough to target; on days when I didn’t feel like I could handle it I wrote about sweaters.

Now, I’ve been truly, deeply over any iota of fucks-giving about anything that Alice and her followers have had to say about me for years now — but still, I’ve found myself loathe to publicly discuss these experiences. First, because I truly believe that someone capable of years-long pain-as-sport is deeply unwell, and deeply unhappy, and I didn’t feel good about the idea of participating in that game.

But the main reason I couldn’t write about it was because when you are subjected to this kind of thing every single day of your life for years, you may “get over it,” but it will still live in your body. To this day, I choose not to look at the Amazon page for my first book not because I think the “reviews” are legitimate, or because they hurt me (they don’t, not anymore)…but rather because my body remembers how it felt during that time, and it’s not a feeling I enjoy revisiting.

Before you ask: Of course I consulted lawyers. At the time, the overarching opinion seemed to be, “Well, you asked for it by deliberately becoming a public figure.” Nowadays, I think we have a much fuller understanding of what a “public figure” means in the context of blogging, and it rarely involves the insulating factors of celebrity-level money, protection, or power. You can also have something you want to tell me, and feel reasonably certain that I will read your words.

I don’t know what online personalities deal with these days because I’m an Old, but maybe targeted hatred is just so pervasive that it simply doesn’t hit as hard. Maybe today’s creators are simply better at managing such things. I don’t know.

The above interview covers, among other things, my lawsuit-curiousness

There was a positive side to all this, by the way; one I don’t take lightly. When I was pregnant with my son, I obsessed over the posts about what a horrible mother I would be, rolling each custom-crafted brand-new terror around in my mind for weeks. After he was born came the comments about him personally. They said he looked like he had Down Syndrome, and meant it as an insult. They made fun of his name — using the full version so that one day, when this baby grew up, the post might pop up in his Google results. They said that I was a white supremacist because I’d mentioned my newborn’s pale yellow duck-fluff and bright blue eyes.

As a brand-new mother with crippling postpartum depression, very little in the way of a support system, and zero friends who could relate to this particular situation, let me tell you: I was not okay. First, it’s simply no fun having an unknown but large-seeming number of people hoping to watch you fail as a mother, especially when that’s something you’re already good and terrified about.

Second, I feared my son — and, later, my daughter — would one day find these forums and read what internet strangers had to say about their mother. I worried that they’d read the words and believe them; that I’d have to win back the love of my own children.

From where I stand now, this all seems pretty silly, of course. It’s playground-level bullying, and it makes me feel petty to even give it air. And besides, my children know what kind of a mother I am; they can form their own opinions about the ways in which I am inadequate (and oh, I’m sure they shall).

But they are also built of sturdier stuff, having been raised in a world where we all understand why “haters” do what they do (literally always because they’re being triggered about something that bothers them about their own lives. Literally. Always). We’ve been talking about the pitfalls of online engagement since they were in diapers; they’ve known the expression “be kind, for everyone is fighting a hard battle” since they could speak. They navigate the Internet with the ease that comes with never having lived an analog day in their lives. And when I ask them how they’ll feel if they — oh, I don’t know. Say one day they put up a YouTube short, and get a cruel comment. What then?

To this, they roll their eyes. “They’re just trolls, mom.”