On my fear of being yelled at

On the internet. (Mostly.)

A passage from Hank Green’s November 8th We’re Here newsletter:

“I have been trained by making stuff on the internet to be constantly aware of all issues that currently exist because I want to avoid (and I can't stress this enough) the 0.01% of people who are going to reply to my tweet or leave a comment on my video giving me a hard time for doing something that is totally normal. I need to get my head wrapped around the extent to which I tiptoe around attempting to decrease the odds that someone will yell at me on the internet.”

Call me out directly next time, Henry. 😅 Especially the last sentence of that paragraph—it could have come from my own brain, forever altered by nearly six years posting publicly on a growing social media account.

“I need to get my head wrapped around the extent to which I tiptoe around attempting to decrease the odds that someone will yell at me on the internet.”

In low periods, this yelling feels constant. I express my support for ethical breeders? I am the worst kind of capitalist, pushing a brutal ideology onto innocent sentient beings. I post a photo of a Kit Kat on Halloween morning? I should boycott big-name candy companies. I say my favorite blue jumpsuit is from Target? I promote fast fashion.

Sometimes the insular nature of the online dog community—specifically the online dog training community I tried to cement myself in early on—magnifies strangers’ prickliness. We are so deep in these weeds of structure and reinforcement history and furniture “privileges” and off-leash reliability and canine nutrition and what-defines-a-training-tool. It’s entirely plausible a sentence I post in passing will leap off someone else’s phone screen to unintended consequences. (I once shared my belief that despite all our public behavior training Scout could never be a service dog—she’s too fearful, too sensitive, her genetic capacity seems to preclude that level of calm in our world’s chaos—and received a message from someone hurt I’d “said cattle dogs can’t be service dogs”.)

I’m naturally drawn to nuance, but Instagram’s constant feedback has amplified a healthy-ish urge to prod and dissect and play devil’s advocate and turned it into something else entirely: A compulsion. What disclaimers do I need to add? How can I provide the appropriate context for my words to dodge any and all misunderstanding? Have I acknowledged enough lately that our dogs, preferences, environments, and lifestyles are different (and that it’s okay we aren’t the same)? Should I add another “personally” into every paragraph to emphasize that me saying I do something is not me trying to tell you to do it?!

Of course, it’s easy to blame this on the internet. I have to admit being “extremely online” isn’t the only origin of my nervousness, though. In seventh grade I was talking with a classmate about yearbook club—I don’t even remember the start of the conversation, who we were discussing or what—and suddenly she cocked her head and said “you really don’t like when people are mad at you, huh”. (I second-guess this memory every time it surfaces. How did a fellow thirteen year old observe so easily something I tried to hide even from myself? But the moment is so clear, because I hated it so much. I yearned to be above such petty things as “who’s mad at who” and had been found out. I was a fraud.)

For the record, I have absolutely been a fraud. Not regularly (I hope) but often enough it keeps me up on the bad nights. The most glaring example was a few years back when a large dog training account enamored me to the point where I said things, in hopes of gaining their approval, I still cringe thinking about. Not silly embarrassing things—actually hurtful things about other people who had done nothing wrong except try to survive while sharing publicly on the internet. Exactly what I was trying to do, too. Gossiping about them did not make me any more successful at the pursuit.

And even though I got out of that “friendship” shortly after, it wasn’t without feet dragging and self-consciousness and a horrifying desire for things to still be amicable. I’d decided I didn’t even like this person, didn’t enjoy who I was with them, absolutely didn’t want to become them, and I still got clammy and adrenalized thinking about them being upset with me.

I mean. Come on, Haley.

There are too many confounding variables in the equation of “why am I like this” to properly parse cause and effect, nature and nurture, innate personality and external socialization. (This is precisely the conversation we end up having about dogs, too, when things get hard and messy. We can never really know.) I do think my yearning for harmony is partially “just me”. Ever since I can remember I’ve liked complexity and gray area and holding hands while agreeing to disagree—or better yet, realizing we actually just came at a topic from different valid perspectives!—even in the lowest of low stakes situations. But I think my most intense overthinking, my impulse to justify and explain every single decision I’ve ever made, has gnarlier roots than straight-up personality.

Was it my sense growing up, so typical as to sound boring, that I didn’t belong anywhere? At any moment I might be audited. I must always be prepared to argue my case. Was it the first boy I had a crush on who told me I wasn’t “cool” enough to date (and so the only way to remain in his life was as a friend, a constant golden-retriever friend, acting as a perfect sounding board and never as a source of my own contradictory opinions)? Was it less specific: not one situation but hundreds, thousands, of small moments where I learned how to be a palatable girl?

What I do know is that I’m tired of it. I never want to lose the part of myself, especially online, that enters every room in good faith and trusts thoughtful communication to carry us through. I do want to shed the part that tears up when someone leaves a nasty comment, the part that whispers to Sean “I want to share this but I’m afraid the internet will get mad so maybe I won’t”.

Explanations (even the “extra” ones, rooted in overthinking) can provide value. To this day I get lovely messages from strangers who are grateful I shared bottom-of-the-iceberg context about a given moment with Scout. (I inhaled other people’s notes the same way when I first adopted her. Still do, sometimes.) We need critical communication that is open, and nuanced, and willing to meet people where they’re at. We just… also need less yelling. And I sure as hell need more confidence.