Last week, I had some thoughts on the Oreogate thing (you can read about that here if you missed last week’s newsletter). I ended up making a reel about it too - my angle was less about whether the mom's story was real and more about the food moralization piece and the debate the whole thing kicked off.
I don't think of myself as someone who "goes viral," and honestly, I don't believe I have what it takes. This isn't self-deprecation in any way, I just don't have the energy for constant output, or the editing prowess, or, if I'm being honest, that many things I think are fascinating enough to hold a stranger's attention for six seconds.
I also take my time to process things. Usually, by the time I'm done thinking something through, the internet moment has passed.
The reel hit 2,000 views and I was mildly amused. That's above average for me, so I finished my coffee and moved on.
Later that evening I opened the app and saw the comment count was 20+. I went to reply, and that's when I realized the view count had gone past 10,000. Oh wow, I thought, and closed the app.
The next morning my husband asked how many views the reel was at. I opened the app. 25,000. My eyebrows went up. My heart rate, unhelpfully, also went up.
For context, "viral" on Instagram depends on the size of your account. For mine, the threshold is around 50,000, which I didn't think I'd hit. But part of me was starting to wonder if I might. And another part of me was starting to get nervous because I’ve been warned about what tends to happen when a post reaches that many people.
Have you been told this too?
I've been told, more than once by people I respect, that when people start hating on you, that's how you know you've made it. And that my fear of that hate is a mindset thing I'm supposed to work on, because the strong people who make it have gotten over it.
I'm pretty sure I'm not the first person to hear this.
In a way, it is purely statistics. When enough people see what you do, some of them will misread it, decide the misreading is the true version, and the misreading will sit on the internet next to the actual thing you said, more or less permanently. There's no correction button that you can press on other people's interpretations of you.
By noon the next day I opened the app and saw 50,000, and I realized I wasn't excited. What was going through my head was - oh no, do I need to make another reel that people find this "interesting" now? I've never loved the idea of appeasing the IG algorithm, but I also know that's part of the deal of using the app to build a brand.
Then “it” came
At 60,000, it came in.
My brain immediately started sorting through what they might have meant. Was it that I hadn't researched whether the original story was real? Because I said in the reel that it may or may not be real, and that either way, the conversations it sparked were the interesting part. Was it the trauma angle - the one where people were saying the mom claimed her kid's Oreo behaviour was linked to trauma? Because I did look at that, and I chose not to speak to it because I never saw the claim myself and I try not to comment on things I can't verify. Or was it a research angle I actually missed? Because the reel was about food moralization, which I've thought about a lot, both as a doctor, a mom and a person.
I went through every emotion in about 90 seconds. Angry that someone would accuse me of not doing the exact thing I try to make sure I do. Worried that maybe they were right and I really had missed something. Sad that this was the deal - if enough people see your stuff, someone will say something like this. Upset that maybe this meant I couldn't "handle" being seen, and that some of the people I looked up to were right about the mindset thing.
And yes, I'm aware how much overthinking is packed into that paragraph. That's my brain most days.
Ultimately…
What I noticed, and this is the part I actually want to talk about, is that my first move wasn't to doubt or dismiss them. It was to open a mental filing cabinet and audit myself. Which angle did I miss. Did I miss it. What if I missed it.
That reflex is the thing a lot of people, I’m noticing, have been told to soften. Doctors get told to stop letting a difficult review or complaint eat at them all weekend. Teachers get told not to let a parent's email occupy their mind for three days. Writers and creators get told to never read the comments. The advice is nearly identical across all of it: care less about what the loudest critics say, and you'll be okay.
But for a certain kind of work, the caring isn't a separate thing that can be dialled down without cost. The reflex that flinches at criticism and the reflex that made the work careful in the first place are usually the same one. Which is exactly the question I keep bumping up against - if I soften “the caring”, what happens to my work?
I write about the things we don't usually examine. Food that gets moralized, defaults that get inherited, advice that's built for a specific person that was not you. I can only do that if I'm willing to keep asking whether I looked hard enough, whether I saw it clearly, whether the angle I chose was the right one or a lazy one. The audit is the thing.
Maybe what the people around me are actually pointing at is triage. Learning to notice which comments are giving me information and which aren't, and giving them the amount of time it actually deserves. The one that accused me of not doing the research probably deserved less of my mental bandwidth than it got. But I don't want to be the person who stops going through it. The going through is why, at least in my opinion, anything I write is worth reading.
I hit 60,000 views feeling more trepidatious than excited, which the people I look up to might tell me proves their point. Like many times, no solid answers for this train of thought, just lots of thinking about thinking and then overthinking about the overthinking.
A Thought To Carry Forward:
"Grow a thicker skin" assumes the caring is a bug. Sometimes the caring is the reason the work was worth doing in the first place.