Last week when I published my newsletter, I sent a text to Emily that said “Do you think everyone feels like they are going to be cancelled every time they post something or is it just me?” to which she said probably not everyone, but maybe people who’ve been cancelled?
To date I don’t believe I’ve written about the experience of being cancelled1 (a term I am using loosely, there is a wide spectrum of situations and vastly different interpretations of what being 'cancelled' even means) and that’s because when you’ve been through something like that, you just want it to go away and never come back and you’re certain that even speaking of it will somehow charm it back into existence so it can finish you off for good.
But I was cancelled. Twice. The first time when I published an Op-Ed very many people decidedly did not like, and the second within the institution I founded. In many ways those experiences freed me to write about anything and everything without the kind of fear I used to hav…