From Insult to Insight
One of the most fundamental lessons of doing anything creative is figuring out how to handle your haters. If you have no haters then you just haven't published enough work yet. I mean, there are even hater-bots these days, algorithms that trigger when certain hashtags are used and respond with computer- generated insults. What I'm saying is that just existing can get you a hater. Hater-management is real.
The most common advice you get falls into two categories:
- ignore your haters
if they hate then let em hate and watch the money pile up (50 cent)
- embrace your haters
send the haters all my love, x and o (drake)
Both are essential approaches. Especially the embracing one - I'm a big fan of using # of haters as an indication that I'm going the right way.
But you ever notice how, no matter how hard you try to ignore and embrace, there's always one specific type of hater that casts a spell on you? One specific kind of insult that you just can't shake, that burrows into that curvy grey-matter of your brain and lives rent free?
I have a few of those. There are a lot of insults/comments that'll slide like water off my back but these ones take me out:
- anything about being unoriginal. (You wanna talk about rent-free, there's this comment from 12 years ago on a music video I worked on that still pops in my head every now and then:
- anything about riding on the hard work of others. (The WSJ published an article on my dual-careers a few years back, this comment got me: "Senior Vice President? Yeah of course she can have 2 careers, VP's don't do shit but take credit of those under them.")
I've asked a lot of friends about what comments take them out, and it's amusing that we all have different answers. Some folks are hypersensitive to comments about physical appearance, others get wrecked by claims of inauthenticity. We all have these incredibly tender parts of ourselves that no matter how we try to armor up, even the clumsiest of haters can hit bullseye.
So here's the thing - the reason you can't ignore those specific haters is because you're not meant to ignore them. (Not yet anyway.) They are guiding you to a desperately vulnerable part of yourself that you have to make peace with.
You can't ignore these haters, you have to deflate them.
You gotta let the air out of them. One of my coaches told me that ignoring emotions without processing them is like trying to hold an inflated beachball under the water. You may successfully push it beneath the surface, but you're fighting with it the whole time. You have to let the air out.
Hater's have no air except for the air you give them. And those incredibly tender/wounded parts of us are so hyper-vigilant that whenever anyone treads close, they go full on DEFCON-1.
What are those wounded parts so scared of? What are they afraid will happen if they don't spring into defense? What are they trying to tell you? The key to releasing the energy of those types of comments is understanding why you're the one creating all that energy in the first place. It's a simple enough concept, but this shit is work let me tell you. (FYI - there's a whole methodology of therapy that is all about understanding these "parts" of yourself that I highly recommend if you want to delve deeper with a professional.)
So listen, if you're struggling with ignoring a certain type of hater, stop trying to ignore them. You weren't really ignoring them anyway, you were just trying to hold an inflated beachball underwater and trying to play it cool like it wasn't about to pop up and hit you in the face. If something really knocks you out, really gets under your skin, examine it. Connect with the part of you that's wounded by it, and the parts of you playing defense. What are they trying to tell you?
Don't ignore your haters, deflate them. (And once the air is out, then hell yeah, ignore the shit out of them. God speed!)