What happens when the internet reads your story (and gets it wrong)

Photo by Philip Oroni on Unsplash

The night my CNA Lifestyle piece about retrenchment went live, I couldn’t sleep.

It was my first time writing about myself in the first person for a public platform (my blog is not counted). I’d written professionally for twenty years, but always about other people, other places, other things. So, the exposure felt different. I felt even more exposed.

Nevertheless, it was still a milestone for me as a writer, so I decided to feature the article as a post on my LinkedIn account. I received lots of Likes, Comments (positive ones) and even DMs. It felt performative, but I am unemployed, and this could help me get noticed by potential clients and employers, so why not?

This piece carried more emotional weight and public resonance than my usual work. I was more self-conscious about what public reaction I might get, so I decided to google it.

BIG MISTAKE.

I found it on a Reddit thread. The person who first posted my article left a positive comment, saying something like, “If you were laid off, this article might resonate.” Then, as I scrolled down, more than 50% of the comments were negative.

Comment sections are their own ecosystem

Here’s what I learned about the internet: most people respond to the headline, not the piece. A certain kind of reader saw “10 months’ notice” and felt personally affronted. I had 10 hours, they said. Try losing your job with no warning.

As if grief were a competition, and mine didn’t qualify. If these commenters had read the article, they would understand that I had to endure a different kind of pain from their immediate dismissal.

Others offered unsolicited advice with the confidence of people who had never had to take it themselves. She shouldn’t tie her identity to her job. Simple and solved. Never mind that I was trying to describe, as honestly as I could, what it actually feels like when something you’ve built your life around slips away.

And then there was the one that stung most: that I was milking it.

Being a writer, writing about myself. The implication being that vulnerability, when put to the page, becomes suspect. Calculated. A performance rather than a truth.

I didn’t pitch the story, but the CNA editor, after reading my blog, thought it would be a good one to share. Was I milking it? Perhaps I was. I am currently unemployed (I’m still considering my options) and need the payment from this assignment. But that’s just one part of it.

I wanted to do it because I knew friends and ex-colleagues who had been laid off and couldn’t quite understand how they felt until they read my blog. They said my blog article helped them put their emotions into words and comforted them without my intending to. So, I hope this CNA piece would reach even more people than my little blog, and it did.

What my editor told me

The CNA editor messaged me. She put things in perspective, the way only someone who has seen a thousand comment sections can. She reminded me that comment culture is its own ecosystem, largely disconnected from the people who actually read and feel things.

That for every person performing outrage in a thread, there are readers who don’t make noise — or who say it somewhere more private. Hearing this made it sting less and, more importantly, helped me see that the comments about me weren’t really about me at all.

Photo by Philip Oroni on Unsplash

The positive responses that mattered more

She was right. The positive responses came gradually, in DMs, emails and LinkedIn messages. Strangers reached out to say my story had helped them name something they’d been carrying.

One reader sent a formal email to my editor (not to me directly, as he had no way to reach me) with a link to a song based on the Buddhist Heart Sutra. “All the best in your transformation,” he wrote. He had read something in my words that warranted responding with that kind of gentleness, and I am thankful for that.

I also received an invitation to a podcast interview from a government agency, but I declined because I wasn’t quite ready to say certain things aloud. (Pretty sure I would choke, and in the worst-case scenario, cry. And I really do not want to cry on my first podcast interview.)

I want to be clear — I didn’t write it for positive responses. But knowing it made a difference, however small, is something I’ll carry with me.

The piece took on a life of its own

I was brainstorming blog topics and decided to search for the piece again. And that’s when I saw that the piece took on a life I hadn’t expected.

A man on Facebook shared my article and said it hit him hard — that he had a long notice period too, and nine years on, he still hadn’t financially recovered. Nine years. That one sentence did more to dismantle the whole “10 months was plenty of time” argument than anything I could have written.

A senior workforce policy advisor turned it into a 398-word LinkedIn essay on what he called “identity durability” — the gap between being professionally prepared and emotionally ready. Preparation for work is not the same as preparation for loss, he wrote. He got it exactly right.

Others used it as a springboard for their own stories or their own services. That’s the internet too — your experience becomes content, context, a hook. You can’t control what people do with your words once they’re out there. I indirectly helped them market themselves. I’m fine with that.

Besides the above, I also found two more Reddit threads, three LinkedIn reposts, and a full commentary piece on The Independent — all built around 1,560 words I’d filed on a deadline, half-terrified, not entirely sure I should be writing it at all.

What I’ve learned about writing publicly

You cannot control what people bring to your words. Some will arrive with generosity and recognition. Some have their own baggage and hand it back to you as criticism. Many won’t read past the headline.

The word limit that felt constraining when I filed the piece turned out to be a kind of protection too — it meant I only gave away what I could afford to. The fuller story lives here, in my own corner of the internet, where I don’t have a comments section,

And nobody can tell me I’m milking it.

Though honestly? If bearing witness to your own life is milking it, I’ll keep the pail handy. There’s more where that came from.