I also find out, now that I have been gone from the Post for a few months, who my real friends are. Anyone who has ever worked in a job where you can do something for people—like provide press or perks or whatever—knows the experience of what happens when you leave that gig. Folks who email you all the time acting like you’re besties often disappear entirely when you are no longer a “favor friend.” And other people, ones who you never imagined would be there for you, suddenly come out of the woodwork, revealing what they care about: you.
One person who I never expected to speak to so much during this time is my friend Taylor Negron. He’s passed away now, but he’s a comedian you may know from The Aristocrats or Fast Times at Ridgemont High or any of his other seventy roles in movies and TV. I first met him when I did a character actor profile on him for the Post, but we kept in touch afterward, and during my time in San Diego, we talk on the phone frequently.
Every time we do, Taylor effortlessly improves my mood and corrects my perspective.
“This time is a gift for you, Mandy,” he says. “Don’t you see, you’ve been so addicted to drama and chaos all your life without realizing it, and now that’s all gone. It’s you and your family and California. Take a walk outside in the San Diego sun, and see if you can get addicted to a flower. I’m serious. I want you to actually try it. Take a walk, and just find a flower and appreciate it. Think of all the excitement you can get from it and feel that peace.”
I do that, and a sense of calm and appreciation bubbles up that I haven’t experienced in a while. It feels a little like . . . wonder. Like the kind I had so much of as a child. At night, I sleep in my mom’s study on the ratty old pullout couch and cuddle next to my dad’s guide dog, who, like all guide dogs, is a special kind of angel.
One day, when I check my email, I get a press release that reminds me of another time.
Amma, the Indian hugging saint whom I first profiled in the Post so long ago, is coming to New York for her annual visit to see her followers.
I may not have the flash of the Post anymore, but I still have the connections. For the hell of it, I decide to email Arianna Huffington, Courtney Love, and Jane Pratt to give them all the personal cell phone number for the swami who handles media and can hook them up with a personal guru visit, skipping lines that stretch for hours—just in case they’re interested.
It’s a strange instinct to have, but I find that those are sometimes my best ones to follow through with and act upon. At least in sobriety they are. About a week later, the butterfly effect begins.
I’ve rekindled Jane’s memory of me from a year before when I applied for a full-time gig, and a few weeks later I get the call. Finally, they do have an opening. They want me to come on board to replace Cat Marnell, who quit months before. I do a test piece for them on deadline about how to achieve the appearance of “just been fucked”–style makeup and hair. Two days later, I am hired.
I’m going back to New York again, this time a completely different person.
I’m thrilled and in awe of this unexpected and exciting turn, but I’m also nervous to leave what I’ve built in San Diego. There is so much peace and softness and authenticity in my life now. I don’t know what will happen when I return to the city where everything went both so right and so wrong.
* * *
2012–15
GETTING TO WORK with Jane Pratt and edit first-person stories from women around the world is a dream come true. Finding myself alienated from my friends and family is not.
It’s hard to understand how I go from a place of love and healing and understanding with my family to what happens next, but the repercussions of directly tapping into the vein of my personal life to write about traumas or regrets is unsettling for people who are much more private individuals, which everyone in my family definitely is. One of my earliest pieces for the site is about losing my virginity to rape, and there is a tremendous amount of awkwardness in discussing the piece with my parents. It feels a bit grotesque, exhibitionistic, and unprocessed. Of course, I’m still proud of the piece that I wrote, but it’s a double-edged sword. There is also a part of me that is sacrificing my own emotional boundaries for the sake of my new job—and Internet clicks.
Every bit of my personal pain becomes commodified and packaged, and sometimes the experiences and revelations don’t go over well with my family. My mom is horrified when I write about her obsessive-compulsive disorder. (We’ve gotten past that now, obviously.) My sister thinks I’m revealing too many things about my life and tells me she feels uncomfortable with the whole thing.
All the “feel the peace in a flower” sentimentality and ease I felt before is trampled. Now there are fights with my family and friends, who wonder: Why am I airing all my dirty laundry for the world when I haven’t even finished examining it myself?
When my mom mentions offhandedly to me that maybe she’ll write something I won’t like in the comments, I block her on Facebook. She doesn’t understand how the Internet works, that there are plenty of strangers out there who make an active hobby of hating me online already. The last thing I need is that kind of threatening vitriol from her. My sister and I eventually stop talking because she is squeamish about some of the stories I am writing, so I angrily unfriend her on Facebook, too.
My dad and I barely speak at all.
But none of that matters, really. Because who needs to talk when you have thousands of anonymous avatars to interact with for hours on end with a constant feedback loop that never stops? New comment notifications pop up rapid-fire everywhere I go, and it feels like a mob of faceless people—some friends, some fans, some haters—who are constantly following me around commenting on the most deeply personal aspects of my life, soul, and mind.
It’s hard for me to even write about this period—and I’ve obviously condensed it dramatically—by virtue of having had to already dissect every little thing that happened in my life at that time either within xoJane or on the weekly podcast that I eventually start called News Whore. I realize that almost every single relationship in my life has now returned to the completely transactional variety.
It is the anti–San Diego.
There is a true irony that people who are blogging or podcasting all about the minutiae of their lives are sometimes the loneliest people of all. I rarely date or get out of the house. I sometimes go to therapy and meetings, but my workaholism is a mask for not actually having any kind of life. If something doesn’t lead to a post I can write (“It Happened to Me: I Had Fun Catching Up with an Old Friend Who Actually Kind of Gives a Shit About Me” is not quite clickbait gold), then why bother?
I just don’t have the time. I’m online and on the phone all day from wake-up to pass-out, finding stories, slinging stories, editing stories, writing stories, promoting stories, trying to keep those clicks up, up, up.
When a news story breaks, I reach out to those involved the instant that I can—individuals who are (like me, in some of the highly personal pieces I write for the site) still in the middle of processing whatever it is they are going through. When I speak to Sydney Leathers about writing a piece for the site reflecting on her role in the explosive Anthony Weiner scandal, we speak for a few hours and she really opens up.
“I just fired my manager,” she tells me. “She wanted me to do porn. I was like, no.”
Then the other line rings mid-conversation. It is Sydney’s manager calling.
“I have to take this,” she says.
I never get a return call from Sydney, although we reconnect years later. Her manager only lets me communicate through her, tells me Sydney is in fact going to do porn and now will only do a piece for us if we can pay $500, which is ten times our (admittedly, not very great) rate.
That piece teaches me something about the rapid-fire pace of the world. In a matter of a single hour, someone can literally become a porn star and her entire life trajectory will change. Eventually, Jane approves the fee—and the piece publishes.
Of course, it is a big traffic hit, as are many first-person pieces I secure and edit for the site: important narratives from rape survivor Daisy Coleman, who went on to do a Neflix documentary; Tuesday Cain, a fourteen-year-old who went viral for her “Jesus Isn’t a Dick; So Keep Him Out of My Vagina” sign at a pro-choice rally; revenge porn crusader Charlotte Laws; Steubenville gang-rape blogger Alexandria Goddard; and Shauna Prewitt, who wrote a searing open letter to politician Todd Akin about being a rape survivor and then bearing the child (destroying his narrative that a woman can’t actually get pregnant if she is the victim of “legitimate rape”). Over time, these viral stories become expected of me as the rule rather than the exception. Instead of any kind of financial compensation or reward, the metric of expectations for my job performance simply changes: Give me that—all the time.
When I secure two exclusives from Duke University student Miriam Weeks, aka porn star Belle Knox, Miriam and I work together all through the night (writing, rewriting, and getting the proper permissions). And I’m very proud of the result: a sex worker’s ongoing manifesto on feminism and double standards for men and women in society. Largely as a result of these hugely viral pieces from Belle Knox, in a single month in 2014, traffic jumps up from a few million uniques to seven million. When I joined the site in 2012, traffic was at eight hundred thousand uniques. While undoubtedly every person who works at xoJane is responsible for this traffic growth, there’s also a gnawing reality. Especially with the Belle Knox stories, there’s an undeniable charting of just how significant these stories are in raising the traffic—and how they have originated from a lot of extra hours I’ve logged. It’s hard not to feel increasingly resentful that I have not received a raise in that entire time.
When I finally meet with someone from our parent company about compensation, her suggestion is to reduce my base salary by $20,000 (with theoretical sky-is-the-limit bonuses contingent on big traffic hits). It feels like such an insult. I’m barely keeping it together on the salary I do make, so this is about the worst possible thing I can be told.
Instead, I take to laughing bitterly at the idea of transparency espoused at the site as I complain to friends. Long hours are spent Gchatting with one of the site’s many talented editors, Lesley Kinzel, until I find myself sobbing and bereft.
“Just talk it all out with me,” Lesley tells me. “It’s healthy. I understand.”
I tell her how enraged I feel to be working at a company that sometimes runs at the speed of molasses—and I can only write things like “Hugs! Love you! Hey lovies!” because that is our brand or something (even when I feel utterly demoralized).
When I try to have a straightforward conversation about this, I discover a doublespeak that feels maddening. At the Post, you are told directly if something is a problem—even if what you are told is hard to hear. At xoJane, it’s more like “I love you, babe” but said with a slightly different tone of voice you are expected to deconstruct, decode, and respond to accordingly.
I’ve seen the site parodied a lot, but I think BoJack Horseman’s “Girl Croosh” nails it most of all. There is a constant rallying cry of girl power, which overlies a culture of secrecy and backbiting. Don’t get me wrong. I’m as guilty as the next person, but it was demoralizing at times.
Jane’s original tagline for the site is famously “A place where women go when they are being selfish, and where their selfishness is applauded.” But in reality, the site is only referring to a very specific kind of woman. She is liberal. She is not snarky or sarcastic about celebrities (I know this sounds strange, but it was a literal rule if you were writing for the site). She doesn’t diet. And she never challenges rhetoric that has been mass-accepted by the collective feminist majority.
At one point, when I commission a piece from author Jo Piazza, who describes trying to lose weight before her book party launch, I am actually reprimanded and told that we can “do better.” Jo is a hugely successful author whom I was lucky to convince to even write a piece for us at all. I am baffled. I of course support body acceptance and fat acceptance, but why can’t you both be a feminist and desire to lose a few pounds in a healthy way? It makes no sense to me.
But I learn that talking about any kind of hypocrisy is not really welcomed. The best bet is just to keep your head down, never raise any issues at all, smile, and do what you are told regardless. Part of this is accepting what your role at the website is.
Jane doesn’t like to talk about editors who work there; rather, she refers to us as her “characters,” whom she has cast. I actually don’t realize what my “character” is until one day a reality production company comes in to observe all of us interacting with one another in a rollicking, freewheeling staff meeting. They are considering doing a reality show based on the website. By way of small talk in our meeting, Jane reveals exactly who she believes my character to be. “And Mandy,” she says, “is the girl you love to hate.”
“Oh,” I say, forcing laughter. “Okay, I didn’t know that.”
I feel so naïve. I never realized that all the self-hatred I wrestled with internally would one day become my “brand” at a fucking feminist website. I was really trying to work on the self-love thing, actually.
Still, at the end of the day, all of these complaints are trivial. Any frustrations I feel are always diminished—and rendered entirely insignificant—when compared with the gratitude I feel for what Jane created in providing one of the most important meeting places for women I’ve ever seen (including giving me the good fortune to work with the tremendous editors I learned from during my time there: Emily, Lesley, and Corynne Cirilli—formerly Steindler, whom I worked with at the Post—and so many more). Jane is an indisputable genius. She completely changed the news industry. Her staple “It Happened to Me” has been ripped off and adopted by pretty much every mainstream news organization nowadays. She pioneered first-person journalism. Not to mention she also gave me one of the biggest breaks of my life, which doesn’t make her a genius, but does make her a godsend to me personally.
* * *
THERE IS A little bit of irony to the fact that I write so much about so many of my most personal issues on a website read by millions, which sometimes leaves me with no time to deal with those issues in real life. Sure, I go to SLAA meetings. I go to AA meetings. I go to Al-Anon meetings. But it takes years sometimes to break out of patterns of self-hatred and self-abuse.
That initial pink cloud from my early days of sobriety is long gone. Now I am just stuck with myself, and the magic is starting to feel dull.
I am not drinking or drugging or betraying my sexual bottom line, but to be quite honest, all that heady elation from my early days of sobriety is so long gone that “recovery” sometimes feels like a chore. Still, I keep doing it. I know that as long as I am sober, that is in itself a victory. But it never looks like the third-act everything-is-suddenly-perfect reinvention that is portrayed in the movies. Sometimes the process is the most unglamorous, irritating process imaginable. Sometimes getting healthy is a drag. But it’s still the right thing for me to do, and I have to remind myself of that daily.
My absolute favorite part about xoJane is the platform it provides for women to shatter stigmas and fight back against the subconscious shaming of women’s lived experiences. That’s what I hope some of my favorite pieces for the site achieve.
I write one called “I Don’t Think I Can Have Casual Sex Anymore Because the Power Balance Shifts So Dramatically,” where I chronicle what is to be my last one-night stand ever. I reveal that at the last minute I took a young man I met on Tinder with me to a media party I was invited to, which was held at a strip club and riddled with porn stars. This was after I’d gotten blown off by a proper OKCupid date. After the young man and I fooled around for a while, I asked him if he’d want to do it again in the future, thinking maybe he could be my new “healthy” friend with benefits. I didn’t want a relationship. Not at all.
“Well, you have my Tinder chat,” he respon
ded, getting up to leave.
“Yeah,” I said. “I get it.”
He left, and I went to my phone and pressed my finger on the app until it quivered. “Are you sure you want to delete Tinder and all its contents?” Yes.
I realize that casual sex feels like I am trying to invert, like a spiky umbrella, that loss of power I felt when I was young by angrily protesting through my actions: “You want to see whore? I’ll show you fucking whore. You will never have any ownership of my soul. Guess what, what you got was a character. There is no intimacy there, and yet, I saw you inside and out.”
But I’m only contributing to a pattern of debasement.
Maybe, I start to realize, my hero’s journey is in transforming and healing myself sexually. My sword can be wielded to cut my attachments to the men whom I’ve let into my precious energy space without regard for how it affects me and the aftermath of what I’ve let inside. My resurrection is in revealing my heart, and only revealing it when someone has proven themselves worthy of being in my ordinary world.
* * *
AS MUCH AS I may occasionally pop up on TV (oh hey, there I am on Dr. Drew, check it out, I’m on Inside Amy Schumer) or take photos with celebrities here and there for my job (I’m booked on a panel with Issa Rae, oh hey, it’s a party with the cast of Orange Is the New Black), the reality of my life is as unglamorous as it gets.
The only real companions I have are my dogs, Sam and Trip. Sam is a pit bull I took home in 2012 from the shelter after a Facebook friend posted his picture, telling me he’d be put down the next morning—and I was his only hope. I am gun-shy about pit bulls in general from coverage of so many incidents on every newspaper job I’ve had, from Florida to New York, but I figure I can at the very least help buy the dog a little more time. Trip is a Cavalier King Charles spaniel I got from a breeder after my vet suggested a companion might help Sam.
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