Dealing with negative feedback…or worse

Also called: “Walk away from the comments section, damn.”

Negative feedback is more accessible today than ever before. Just a handful of decades ago, critics or disgruntled media consumers had to write and mail letters to the artist directly if they wanted to vent their displeasure. If they wanted their criticism to reach a wider audience, they still had to write a letter, but they’d send it to a TV studio, newspaper, magazine, or other public outlet. Regardless of the recipient, this process took a good deal of time, energy, and even postage.

Now critics have (what feels like) a million different ways to deliver their opinions, and those methods take only a matter of seconds. From the armchair art evaluator to the politically-charged weirdo (I’m looking at you, dudes in my ExtremeTech comments), haters can now comment on our work directly, email us, subtweet us, @ us on Instagram, leave a review on Goodreads or Letterboxd or Amazon, or even publish a two-hour YouTube rant about our work. Are a few of these options unhinged? Yes, but they’re available nonetheless. And that means criticism feels virtually unescapable.

If you’re like me, you might struggle to ignore what others have to say about your work, regardless of whether it’s good feedback or bad feedback or pure, unadulterated cyberbullying. You might check what you’ve shared online the moment it goes live, and then a few hours later, and then the next day, as if you have nothing better to do with your time (even though you do). And every time someone has something rude or hateful or well-intended-but-still-hurtful to say, you might receive it like a gut punch, as if this person’s comment says anything about your worth as a creative or a person.

How do we prevent this? Or for creatives with thick skin—I’m sorry by the way, because you should never have had to thicken your skin in the first place, and also this metaphor is really gross—how do we build a healthier relationship with the numerous outlets the internet has given critics?

There’s always the “haters are my motivators” approach, which involves leveraging spite and an overall desire to prove people wrong. But I’ve never jived with that outlook. I don’t want a bitter, anxious part of my heart to be what fuels my work or sits in the back of my mind while I create. I don’t blame those who do find that route helpful, but personally, it isn’t an emotional environment I want to foster inside myself.

I always thought this tweet was fake, so it pretty much made my day (and also ruined it) when I found out it was real.

What about the opposite approach: Keeping in mind those who have outwardly loved and encouraged our work? This is a much more palatable option, and it’s certainly a balm for those days when we’re already feeling down. But I find that it, too, feeds an overarching habit of allowing other people’s opinions and non-constructive feedback to influence what and how we create. On the opposite side of relief that someone liked our work is the fear of disappointing that same person.

Naturally, this leads me to a third philosophy: Not giving a crap what people have to say in either direction, good or bad. This is what suits me best, I think. You’re familiar by now with my “I don’t write to sell” perspective; this is just an extension of that. I prefer to create for my own pleasure, and if people want to leave nice feedback or pay for my work or otherwise support me, that’s great, but my work will fulfill me either way.

I’m still human, obviously. It’s way better when people are nice about my work and do want to pay me, and I’m generally a bit happier on days that I either ignore comments from randos or find a lack of negative ones. I think nearly everyone deserves to experience the joy of having their work embraced not just by friends and family, but also by strangers who aren’t obligated to smile and clap. But when that doesn’t happen, we also deserve to feel proud of what we’ve created.

If you’re someone who struggles with this (as I have in the past, and likely will sometime in the future), here are a few strategies that have helped me care less about others’ opinions:

• Don’t ask friends for the green light to share something. It’s one thing if you’re worried about how you’ve worded a certain sentence or how your color palette might be perceived by people on different devices…but it’s another if you feel the need to ensure three (3) whole people like your work before you post it.

• If the place on which you share your work has a comment section, stop looking at it. Seriously. If you have to download a browser extension that blocks you from viewing the comments, do it—that’s what I did for a while.

• Give yourself a specific amount of time to work through your feelings about a piece of feedback, then make every effort possible to move on. For me, this has meant allowing myself 30 minutes to journal, rant to a friend, or generally stew on a negative comment before getting up to exercise, read, bake, or start working on a new project.

• Remember what you find fulfilling about your creative work. Why do you engage with this craft in the first place? What has it been a good outlet for? (Or a more extreme question: If you knew you’d never share your creative work with anyone ever again, would you still make it? Why?)

Does any of this fix the root cause of the issue (AKA bored, insecure, and inconsiderate people who spread their bad attitudes online)? No. I wish people didn’t feel compelled to share negative feedback and hateful comments with creatives in the first place. I wish grown-ass people who claim to have families and important jobs didn’t spend their time spewing negativity (at best) or misinformation and bigotry (at worst) in the comment and review sections of various online spaces. But those people’s rude inclinations are outside of our control. The least we can do for ourselves—and for our art—is to find a healthy way to deal with it.

What’s been inspiring me lately:

✰ This quote from a 1979 New York Times interview with writer and civil rights activist James Baldwin:

“The bottom line is this: You write in order to change the world, knowing perfectly well that you probably can't, but also knowing that literature is indispensable to the world. In some way, your aspirations and concern for a single man in fact do begin to change the world. The world changes according to the way people see it, and if you alter, even by a millimeter, the way a person looks or people look at reality, then you can change it.”

✰ Yet another quote, this time from author Natalie Goldberg. Full disclosure, lest you think I’m a deeper and more introspective reader than I am: I saw this one printed on the wall in the bathroom of a Prescott, AZ bookstore.

“The deepest secret in our heart of hearts is that we are writing because we love the world, and why not finally carry that secret out with our bodies into the living rooms and porches, backyards and grocery stores? Let the whole thing flower: the poem and the person writing the poem. And let us always be kind in this world.”