The Privilege of Public Disclosure

Last week (or maybe it was the week before), two different essays on The Cut went viral, one by Emily Gould titled “Should I Leave My Husband? The Lure of Divorce” and “The Day I Put $50,000 in a Shoe Box and Handed It to a Stranger” by Charlotte Cowles. I’ll primarily be focusing on the piece by Gould in my response here but both pieces generated a lot of engagement on social media because of how polarizing they were, and how they exposed the worst and most embarrassing aspects of humanity.

Emily Gould has long been known for her “confessional” writing, she’s a Gawker alum, and she’s been writing about the most cringe and self-incriminating aspects of her romantic life since I was in elementary school. This particular piece is about how, in no particular order, she had a mental breakdown because of her husband being more professionally successful than her in the same industry, cheated on him, had a mental breakdown, spent all his money, and then wrote about it for The Cut. She’s getting dragged by right-wingers on Twitter and even some people left-of-center (hi), but there’s a small group of people who are more sympathetic to Gould, are and are using her piece as evidence that mentally ill women are “unfairly demonized” and that it’s typical of Bipolar Disorder to do what Gould did, and quite frankly, I can’t deal with it.

For one thing, Emily Gould gives off big “I got rejected from Brown and went to Kenyon because I have dyscalculia and that’s why I got a 780 on the SAT Reading section and a 570 on the SAT Math section” energy. But that’s not why I find her whole schtick so grating. The thing is, as someone with … a very similar condition to Emily Gould, I was just thinking about the privilege of public disclosure, who’s permitted to share the worst things that have ever happened to them with the world and for better or worse, that person has never been me.

The reality is that the only people who can write long-winded recollections of blowing up their lives and (allegedly) coming back from it are white women in aspirational positions in life. Men can’t generally do it because the audience of pieces like Gould’s skews female and middle class (or up), the group that’s most superficially critical of men even though they rarely follow through with that misandry in a material way. And people of color and poor people simply aren’t eminently emulable to middle and upper class white people who read The Cut (or formerly, Gawker, The Awl, xoJane, etc.). Conversely, regardless of her many character flaws, Emily Gould is writer (high status, low pay career) who’s been in many famous publications that lives in a fancy New York City apartment with a husband that loves her much more than she deserves who’s also very financially successful and whose money she has unfettered access to. You see where I’m going with this.

It just rubs me the wrong way certain people are positing that it makes readers “mean” to judge Gould for her actions in the piece because she had a manic episode. In my mind, the rules of life are universal but it’s harder for some people to follow them than others. Nobody gets rights without responsibilities except babies and unfortunately, none of us are babies anymore. I also find it really grating that people are playing the “woman” card here like actually, people aren’t being critical of Emily Gould because she’s a woman, they’re being critical of her because she’s an abhorrent human being. If the genders were reversed, if her husband was the one that had the breakdown and spent all her money, everybody would be crowing for her to leave him!

I joked on Twitter that having a mental breakdown above the age of 25 was embarrassing but I wasn’t exactly joking. I understand better than most people how terrible mental illness can be but also, you can’t forgo your responsibilities and professional commitments and your marriage vows just because of your mental health. Your kids still need dinner, the trash still needs to be taken out, and your marriage is decidedly not open regardless of what’s going on inside your head. Moreover, while mental illness doesn’t go away as we get older, the highs and lows do dissipate with age that is, unless you, like Emily Gould, monetize those highs and lows for an audience that’s scrutinizing the public humiliation of your self-destruction.

I sometimes riff that I’m deeply unsympathetic for someone who’s been through as much as me but I’m not wrong. To be very blunt, there’s no amount of money you could pay me to publish an essay about the ugliest aspects of who I am, not now and probably not ever. I have a 9-5 job that I need to pay my rent and that provides me my health insurance, which pays for my medications that keep me alive and that is much more valuable to me than the temporary clout I would receive by making a public spectacle of myself. I’ve done and said some not-so-great things in my life, I’ve had embarrassing and devastatingly pathetic moments, I’ve hurt and been hurt by others in seemingly unfixable ways, but while I can and do talk about these incidents and my resultant emotions to my friends and loved ones, I don’t actually think that publicizing them to the world at large would help anybody, least of all me.

Part of the reason I’m writing this right now is that I’m always more upset than usual from roughly mid February to mid March of every year due to a series of trauma anniversaries, and it takes effort for me to do what needs to be done while it’s otherwise almost second nature so the workings of my brain are front and center now more than ever. I think one major reason I feel so angry at the Emily Goulds of the world is that I didn’t accept that level of imperfection even at my worst. The person I hurt most during my … dark phases, was myself, and it was a point of pride for me that I was controlled, poised, and well, hurt inwards. I joked just today that there’s no point to having an eating disorder if you aren’t good at it and then I realized I wasn’t exactly exactly joking.

The point is, for lack of better phrasing, I bullied myself out of being mentally ill and a part of me genuinely believes everybody could have that willpower if they tried hard enough. I know that’s deeply irrational but I can’t control my emotional reactions, I can just control how I respond to them. Maybe I’m the outlier here, and a fundamentally bad person for not really sympathizing with the Emily Goulds of the world, but they put their worst selves out on the Internet to be judged and we may as well oblige them.