How I say whatever I want online (and in life)

I had a dream that I was holding a baby finch, like a little precious bird. And it was my pet. And I put it back in its cage, which was this beautiful, multi-tiered, bamboo cage. And the bird became me when it went into the cage. And all of a sudden, it realized it was up against a window all along, and the window was open, and the bars were wide enough for the bird to fly out, and it had been the whole time.

— Ellen DeGeneres, recounting the dream that inspired her to come out as gay

At a conference this summer, I had several (older) people indicate that they thought I was pretty wild on twitter and several (younger) people ask me something like, "how do you just say whatever you want online?" There are two ways I could interpret that question. First,

How am I permitted to say whatever I want?

Not everyone is free to speak their mind in practice, at least not without serious consequences. I still get a paycheck and have friends because:

• I have a job that lets me share my own views freely online

• I maybe have some cancellation protection because I’m a woman and have a mental illness that I write about

• I have earned a lot of goodwill in the communities I mainly talk to through volunteering, community organizing, helping people out when I can, genuinely taking an interest in others, etc.

But the people asking me how I say whatever I want were not asking me how I made it to a country with free speech protections or how I make enough money to survive. They were asking me how I dealt with social threats. They weren’t asking me how to get past the bars of the cage; they were asking how I had the courage to fly through the bars and out the window.

How do I get over social fears and emotional barriers?

I am less afraid of speaking my mind than many others, but I was not always this way. I learned over my life how much it is worth to me to be honest and speak up when something is important to me. I also had experiences that showed me that feared consequences almost never materialize.

I had a few striking examples and role models to follow. The person most responsible for pivoting me to my current path is my bff from sixth grade, Crystal Smith. Her outspokenness shocked me when we first met. She would tell me about feelings that I was denying about myself even in the privacy of my own mind, like that she was horny or how much she longed for her overworked single mom to spend more time with her, without shame. When she shared intimate information like this, I would sort of pause and hold my breath, waiting for something to happen in response to this forbidden disclosure. But all that happened was that I felt less ashamed of my own secrets, less alone in my mind. I quickly found that I actually preferred her straightforward way of talking and I saw that, despite occasional awkwardness, saying what she really thought almost always led to her getting her actual needs met and being seen and loved for who she really was. She let others know her in a way that I hadn’t considered possible before, without a private room reserved in her mind, shrouded in darkness, where the shadows hid. She wasn’t afraid of who she was or what her thoughts and feelings might be. She admitted mistakes (“I wanted us to come here, but this sucks!”) or when she had been fooled. I wanted that, and I wanted to create a space for others like she had for me, so I started pushing through my fear and being more like her.

The more I said what I wanted to, the more I saw that a lot of the dreaded consequences are just ghosts you can step right through. People act shocked for a bit, but, when they see you don’t shrink at merely having thrown off their mental groove, they often like you for it.

One important trait that is native to me is being a confident know-it-all. I have always been pretty confident that I have valid questions and observations about the world. Even if I feel dumb in some arena, I have faith that if I report my level of understanding honestly and ask questions that that is honorable, relatable, and not worthy of derision. In fact, I see volunteering to be the dumb person who doesn’t get it as heroically providing some shelter for others to admit their confusion. Even when I’m just shooting the shit, I feel confident that whatever I’m saying is fine to say. I can see, though, how someone less confident in their statements would be more hesitant to share what they think.

Most of my life I’ve also been fairly confident I had the moral high ground. I was a vegetarian for reasons of conscience beginning in kindergarten, and I endured a constant stream of grief over it. Not eating animals was extremely important to me, so I was willing to endure a lot for it, but because of that experience I learned that, even when you upset people and cause a stir, the longterm consequences of standing up for an unpopular opinion aren’t all that negative. I missed out on being popular and accepted in many times and places, but I got a lot of things that matter to me, like respect and trust. This whole experience informed my outspokenness greatly, because it showed me all the ways that people (kids and adults) react to something they perceive as offensive, like the suggestion that they are doing something wrong. People who actually disagreed with me and thought eating animals was okay didn’t engage very much. People who engage fear that you are right. Sometimes I would argue with the same person on and off for two years before they suddenly tried vegetarianism themselves. Some people had questioned the morality of eating meat before but felt powerless to do any different, and they thanked me for an example of doing something about it. Almost everyone who disliked how my mere presence as a vegetarian was judging them also respected me (on some level or another) for being consistent with my own values and speaking plainly about it (“Yes, I think what you are doing is immoral.”).

But what about the virtue of tact? Even though I’m not fully native to outspokenness, I have been cultivating it since I was a child, and I’ve never really been tempted by the benefits of tact because I’ve never really accessed them! There are direct costs to saying whatever you want, absolutely. I just don’t care very much about them. But perhaps there are benefits that accrue when you live with tact a lot of your life. Maybe I’m missing out on certain kinds of relationships or career paths I could otherwise have had. I have to admit that I don’t really care about the possibility of missing out on these indirect benefits. People are sometimes mad at me or think I shouldn’t have said something. But I’m just like “so?” I have faith after many years of experience that these incidents blow over. If you do care a lot about being in conflict with others and that’s not how you want to live your life, that’s fine. Maybe you don’t actually want to say “whatever you want”.

Sometimes I wonder if conflict-averse people who ask me how I get away with my hot takes are really asking “how do you keep people from getting angry at you?” The simple answer is “I don’t! People are angry at me all the time.” The more complex answer is that I think I have taught people how to treat me on this. I’m not intimidated by anger (if anything it makes me feistier) and every year I’m less afraid of people’s threats to disapprove of me. The last time I really struggled with disapproval from the internet was during the rise of SJWism. Woke accusations that I was harming people by questioning their ideas (or by being white, liking men, etc.) and would therefore be ejected from the tribe really used to get to me, because I had partly relied on labels like “liberal” to define my morality up until that point (and I thought maybe they were right that my privilege blinded me to the truth so I had to take orders from them). But I didn’t solve this conflict by making the SJWs agree that I was right or good— I got through the pain and fear of their rejection by siding with my own best efforts at seeing the world and acting with integrity.

The perks of saying whatever I want

Being bold and forthright has led to so many opportunities for me, and it continues to open up opportunities that are better for me than I had imagined possible.

First and most importantly, I GET TO SAY WHAT I REALLY THINK. It is immensely important to me to be able to be honest, and I’ve structured my life such that I can have luxury levels of telling it like I see it. I like to be honest and express what I think beyond the level that I consider morally necessary, maybe even beyond the level that is always good for me. This might not be a perk for everyone, but for me the hugest perk of simply saying whatever I want is getting to say whatever I want.

A result of saying what I want is that people get to know the real me. I like being known for who I really am— this is one of the fundamental needs and pleasures of life. The more I am seen the more I can connect, or the more I give others the opportunity to self-select in or out of closer association with me. Of course, my online-only friends don’t know me the same way as my family or close irl friends do, but what they know of me is authentically me and they want to interact with me in the way that I want to interact. The people who don’t want to interact with the real me know who that is so they don’t have to.

Even people who don’t like what I have to say or dislike the way I say it frequently express respect for me for being honest and brave. I firmly believe from my experiences online and in life that people feel respected when you are straight-up with them, even if they also feel annoyed or reactive. And people I might have predicted won’t like me often surprise me with the depth and quality of their engagement.

The cage of incomplete self-expression may be a fine place, and it has some benefits, like avoiding conflict, but the skies offer a chance to soar and be free! If the gaps between the bars of your cage are wide enough to get out, I say fly.