You're Never Weird on the Internet (Almost)

by Felicia Day

  I said “NO!” to everything. A very good friend of mine told me once, “Of everyone I know, you need to build a bubble around yourself.” Well, I took steps to inflate that bubble. Anything that gave me the remotest iota of stress, I dumped. I set extreme parameters around my company. “I’ll be working from home now. I’m only coming into the Geek & Sundry office once a week, and if I don’t feel like doing that, I won’t.”

  “How long?”

  “However long I need.”

  Once you tell people exactly what you will and won’t do, it’s amazing how they’ll adjust. Or they won’t. And then an opportunity or relationship goes away. And that’s okay.

  Once I got my body on the right track, slowly but surely healing, day by day, I started working to repair my mind. It was not easy, because everything felt shattered into a thousand-piece puzzle. But I finally sat down and tried to put those pieces back together, one by one.

  I started with months of self-involved and semi-crazed journaling. I filled five notebooks with every insecurity and rage and sadness I could think of. I wrote down everything I felt, including terrible things about people I loved, in order to move through and get to the TRUTH of what I couldn’t see through my fogged state of mind. And I hate to say it, but the more ruthless I got, the better I felt.

  “I hate X’s face! I’ve hated him for years!”

  Working through my initial reaction always got me to understand what was really going on.

  “Okay, I don’t really hate him. I really feel upset about that one time he forgot to invite me to his birthday party. I mean, everyone we knew was posting so many fun Instagram pictures, and I pressed a heart on all of them even though the whole time I was curled up in my bed sobbing!”

  Also, deeper and less funny stuff than that.

  I dug and dug and kept digging. All that introspection helped me get perspective and realize, This thing I’m feeling, it might NOT be the TRUTH . . .

  There’s a great Eleanor Roosevelt quote, “No one can make you feel inferior without your consent.” Well, I discovered that, even though the feeling had ruled me my entire life, no one could make me be anxious without my consent. It was an amazing realization.

  And yes, I did seek professional mental help. But avoidant habits die hard. So instead of going directly to a certified specialist, first I decided to try the softball approach and hired a “creativity life coach.” Boy, did this woman embrace the clichés of her profession hard. She wore a lot of tie-dye. I had to carry crystals to “ward off the negative spirits.” Just entering her office every week gave my sinus cavities aromatherapy seizures. Oh, and she loved the hypnosis.

  “You are a tree. You are the trunk. You have to cut off the branches that are draining you and concentrate on that part before you can reach outside yourself again. Repeat after me, I am a trunk.”

  “I feel stupid, but I am a trunk. I am a trunk.”

  Talking to a real objective human who was a captive audience (since I was paying her) was a good first step. But when she wanted to move on to some strange rebirth regression therapy with screaming and stuff, it occurred to me that she wasn’t accredited and could legally blog about how weird I was later. So FINALLY I moved on and got my very own certified psychologist. With a lying-down couch and everything!

  Showing up each week and having someone to complain to without the fear of someone tweeting about it was spectacular. I would recommend ANYONE try it. We’re all a garbage dump of dysfunction, but if you get in there and churn the problems, they turn to mulch faster so new things can grow out of them. (I have no idea how to mulch, so I hope that analogy is accurate.)

  Even with all those efforts, recovery was slow. A few months in, I was ready to give myself an Olympic gold medal for minuscule things. Like mustering the effort to refill an empty toilet paper roll. Look at you taking initiative. Go, girl!

  But after a while, and I mean MONTHS of learning how to be a real human and attending several new-wave ’80s concerts (hearing “The Safety Dance” in person can be incredibly healing), the pressure I’d put on myself my whole life . . . lightened. Eventually, I emerged from my own private Hades. And I used the time to re-form my brain to be less anxious, live in the present, and not panic about the future or regret the past. (As much as I could, having installed so much messed-up hard-wiring before.)

  I started getting creative ideas for the company again. I got motivated to throw out my old stretched-out bras that hung open at the top like a pocket. During that time of self-care, I became a different person. But it was fine. Everyone adjusted to the “new me,” including me.

  Eleven months later, during the summer of 2014, I was eating a burrito in my car before a Geek & Sundry meeting I was super excited about. I thought about all the people in my life who’d helped me through the horrible year and a half before, and realized, Wow, it must have been really hard on my boyfriend/business partner/friends for me to be so unhappy for so long. And I started crying. Because it felt like I had finally recovered enough to be able to think about other people again. (There was also a Mumford & Sons song playing at the time. Banjo + Black Beans = Waterworks.)

  Yeah, yeah, success is a ladder, a marathon instead of a sprint and all that crap. Everyone can TELL you stuff like that, but you really have to understand advice in relation to YOURSELF, or it’s all just nice intellectual theory.

  Weathering the rough times requires a lot of self-confidence outside the things you can’t control, like career and what other people think of you. You need to be able to feel proud of yourself even if you were living in a tiny hut in the middle of nowhere, taking care of goats. You are unique and good enough JUST AS YOU ARE. As a theoretical goat herder.

  It was the toughest lesson of my life, learning how to let The Guild go. And how to manage a business bigger than a one-garage web show. Even tougher than the forty-man raids in World of Warcraft. I have many new projects with my company and outside it that I care about now, but none of them will ever be all of me. I learned better than to let that crap happen again.

  In the end, I’m able to look back without shame or regretful nostalgia, and think, You made something great. And something new will come around. Or not. Either way, do the work you love. And love yourself. That’s all you can do in this world in order to be happy.

  - 11 -

  #GamerGate and Meeeeee!

  That one time when having a vagina and a love of video games was not such a great combo.

  I have a folder labeled “Hate Folder” that sits in the middle of my desktop. It’s where I save screenshots of the worst things people have said to me online. (“Fifty Shades of Felicia!”) For some reason, it takes the sting away to herd all the toxic comments into a corner of my hard drive, aggregating the losers I’d like to hunt down in real life and run over with a dump truck.

  Then back up, and run over again! (Too far?)

  If it’s too disgusting to say to another human being, I guarantee someone has said it to me online. The internet is amazing because it connects us with one another. But it’s also horrific because . . . it connects us with one another. Whether we want the connection or not. The only real-life analogy I can think of is if a random person were allowed to walk into your home, punch you in the face while you’re eating your oatmeal, then walk out again with no fear of consequences. After one incident you’d be looking for a new zip code, huh?

  Here are some fun examples of the human awfulness I’ve collected over the years.

  Once someone posts that you’re “So ugly I wouldn’t have sex with your corpse,” that’s when you know you’ve arrived online!

  And sure, everyone says the best approach to negative comments is “Don’t feed the trolls,” that ignoring negativity is the best policy. This approach is great in theory, but emotionally, it’s HUMANLY IMPOSSIBLE.

  Biology backs me up. It’s proven that our brains give more attention to negative experiences than positive ones. (I read it in a study. Reference: internet.)
Every online creator jokes about how you can read a thousand great comments about your work, but it’s always a single terrible one that makes you think, They’re right. I should be ejected into the vacuum of space. It would be a public service. REASON: One of the brain’s main jobs is to alert us to environmental threats. That’s probably why I have a “Hate Folder” rather than a “You’re Awesome” folder. (Note from inner therapist: start one of those.) Over the years, I thought I’d seen it all. I thought I’d experienced every rotten thing the internet could fling at people.

  And then #GamerGate happened. A perfect, hateful, digital gumbo that gave the gaming world, and me, a black eye not soon to be healed.

  I’ll summarize the history briefly for anyone out of the loop. From my point of view. Because it’s my book. If you illegally downloaded this chapter just to parse and argue with my interpretation of events line by line (and I know it will happen, yay!), well, you’re probably the kind of person I’m not very nice to in this section anyway.

  Hello! Not a pleasure to meet you!

  The whole #GamerGate thing started in August 2014, with a guy getting revenge over a really bad breakup by publishing every excruciatingly and maniacally specific detail online.

  I found out about it early on, after seeing a bunch of gamers I follow on Twitter talking about “that Zoe post.” Oooh, gossip? I’m at home on a Friday night wearing sweats and eating cheddar popcorn as usual. Juicy! I clicked over to read a long, rambling blog entry, scrolled down page after page to see IMs, emails, and other private information a guy had collected on his ex-girlfriend and published for the world to rummage through. Evidence of her cheating on him, peppered with implications of sexual favors traded for reviews of the game Depression Quest that she had designed (accusations that were later disproven. Repeat: disproven). It was creepy. I remember being horrified. Then judging her a little. Then feeling bad about it. And then thinking, What woman would ever date this creep again?!

  Usually controversy, even this terrible, disappears pretty fast on the internet. The people whose hobby it is to hate things move on to rip apart a new game or make fun of a celebrity’s vacation cellulite. But this situation started, strangely, to gather more and more steam. More hatred and, most frightening: a strange sense of justice on the part of the attackers. I think the same viral effect that leads people to share a crazy Korean music video a billion times is the same kind of phenomenon that helped give rise to #GamerGate. You can FEEL the wave of emotion online when something is about to go viral, good or bad. A scientist I met once mathematically compared internet behavior to swarm behavior seen in starlings or locusts. Well, that weekend, the hate locusts started swarming.

  Hackers leaked Zoe’s personal information. She received rape and death threats and was forced from her home. Videos of her nude photos were spread and Photoshopped across the internet to shame her, much to the amusement of the trolls. People even tracked down her father to call him and tell him what a “whore your daughter is.” (I mean, how sad do you have to be as a human to think THAT was a good use of your afternoon?)

  As someone who has been an advocate in gaming for many years, especially as a woman, I watched all this happen from the sidelines and thought, This is disgusting! I wanted to step up and speak up against the bullying . . . but I didn’t. Why?

  Because I was afraid. On a much smaller scale, I’d been on the receiving end of a slice of this hate myself. And I didn’t want to relive any part of it.

  The roots of both incidents lie in 4chan, an anonymous website generally associated with hate speech and cartoon porn addiction, and the starting point for the attacks on Zoe Quinn. Basically, it’s the watercooler for some of the worst of the internet.

  In 2012, after all my years on the web, I thought I’d developed some pretty tough troll armor until some people on 4chan decided to attack me en masse for a music video I did for my weekly Geek & Sundry web show, The Flog. My friend Jason Miller is a country music artist, and at the time I thought it would be fun to combine his style with my love of gaming and see what happened. Okay, SURE, nature probably didn’t want those two things mashed together EVER, but that was the point of the show: to throw things against the wall and see if they stuck. I wanted to sing and be creative and hoped the audience would enjoy the experience as much as I did!

  Oh, you naïve, dumb-ass girl.

  We spent a few hundred dollars to make the video, borrowed someone’s house, and shot in the desert without a fire permit. We didn’t light any matches, so it was cool. The end result was cute. Not mind-blowing, but the song was well produced, and I got to dress up as Tomb Raider character Lara Croft, which was a bucket list item. (And proved to me that big boobs DO look better in tank tops. I stuffed HARD.)

  I uploaded it like any other video, with the attitude, It’s free to watch! Don’t dig it? No harm, no foul, right? Er . . . not so much.

  Contempt for women who call themselves “Gamer Girls” has existed for a while online. In fact, I’d been careful to avoid the label over the years for that very reason. But I decided to title the video “Gamer Girl, Country Boy” anyway. And that gave the people who hated me, and who hated the very concept of women having a voice in gaming, a reason to attack. And their feedback was awesome!

  The video was shared on a 4chan forum and a tidal wave of bile hit the video. Hundreds and hundreds of comments, the depravity of which even jaded little me had never seen.

  I was talentless. I was fake and hideous and ugly. (I’ll admit I’d made a bright yellow eye shadow choice that I’ll rue until the day I’m dead.) I was denigrated on every personal level, my work dismissed as the desperate and pathetic attempts of an “attention whore.” According to the comments, I got where I was by manipulating geeks with my looks, and at the same time, I was repulsively ugly and hard to masturbate to. As a crowning achievement, I was deemed responsible for the “downfall of gaming.”

  A multibillion-dollar industry destroyed by little ol’ me? Aw, shucks!

  Anyone who defended me online was called a “white knight neck-beard,” a term that describes a guy who defends a girl online solely in order to get laid. A lot of the time, it works. And if you were a woman defending me, pish, you weren’t even worth addressing. Hateful, bullying comments flooded the supportive community I was so proud of creating. Even my most hard-core fans were left reeling.

  I certainly was.

  After about ten thousand misogynistic and a ton of FACTUALLY INACCURATE comments (trash me if you will, but do a little research first), they finally got to me. I’d been making videos for five years at that point. I’ve seen animated GIFs of myself doing . . . you don’t wanna know. Some involving very forward dolphins.

  The comments spread like a fungus across my self-confidence. It devastated me to see people dismiss my career because of one four-minute video. I felt ashamed for creating it and everything else I’d ever made. I thought, Is this what people have been thinking for years? How stupid was I to think I could sing? I don’t want to be SEEN ever again.

  For months I stopped putting my heart into the things I made. It was one of the reasons I couldn’t write the last Guild season without feeling crippling self-doubt on every page.

  Sad but true, I did what I have told so many people over and over not to do:

  I let the trolls get to me.

  I didn’t realize at the time how much that incident affected me, but I stepped away from gaming in a lot of subtle ways. I still considered myself part of the world, but I turned down a ton of jobs and event appearances. And those changes in my behavior all led me to stifle myself when I felt the urge to speak up about #GamerGate.

  The timing was particularly bad, personally, because a few weeks into the uproar, at the end of August 2014, the infamous “Celebrity Hacking Scandal” happened, where dozens of prominent actresses and performers had private nude pictures stolen and exposed to the world. (Wow, jerks were really busy that fall ruining lives online! Also: the stolen pictures were firs
t posted on 4chan. So much great stuff originates there, huh?)

  As someone nowhere NEAR the victims on the celebrity-importance ladder, imagine my surprise when I was contacted by several hackers via my HACKED phone number warning me that I was a future target. My name was on a request list for compromising photos, and people were supposedly offering big dollars to back it up. I counted myself lucky that I had fans in the hacker world. (How cool, right?) But being hunted for boobies? Slightly terrifying.

  So, while Zoe and other people were being ripped apart online, I was holding my tongue, trying to erase anything from my online accounts that I didn’t want made public for the world to see. Any picture, Is that too much side boob? I’ll erase it. Any email, OMG why would I think that was funny?! Delete. I spent a week ripping out pieces of my digital life that I didn’t want people poking around. I’m sure I missed a lot. When you examine your underwear close enough, EVERYTHING looks a little bit suspect.

  I knew sharing my thoughts about the situation would burn me. So I stayed out. And with other prominent people, men and women, jumping in to take a stand against the bullying and hatred, I honestly thought the whole thing would go away soon. I think everyone sane in the gaming world did.

  But it didn’t. It got worse. Because the issue somehow morphed from attacking a single woman over a messed-up revenge post to a quasi-conservative movement striving for “ethics in game journalism.” A large segment of the newly anointed “#GamerGate movement” decided that as a result of “the Zoe post” there was corruption running rampant in the game journalism world. And THEY were the people to fix it.

  They focused a large amount of their wrath on people trying to add dialogue about feminism and diversity in gaming, condemning them as “Social Justice Warriors.” (That label was always so weird to me, because how is that an insult? “Social Justice Warrior” actually sounds pretty badass.) It turned into a mob. One that was disjointed, with lots of differing agendas, but all surfing the wave of vengeful emotion together. Like the French Revolution over that cake thing.