Confessions of a Delusional Almost-Hack

I have no idea what I’m talking about and I’m not alone

Delusion, Part 1

I have to say this fast because it’s embarrassing: last summer I sat on a beach wondering if my boyfriend, Ian, was ghosting me because I hadn’t heard from him in three days. (Ian is not his real name. In case I decide to murder him, I don’t want this story used to prove premeditation).

My friend Sydney, who is so young that she asked “who’s this?” when I turned up Led Zeppelin on the way home, gently tried to get me to see that I was, in fact, being ghosted. But I refused to see it, so I sent a nudgy (but nice) text to Ian.

To my great delusional delight, he responded. I then proceeded to completely lose my mind, concluding that not only was I not being ghosted, but that the fact that I thought I was in the first place was a result of women being conditioned to believe they were constantly being rejected.

This was, in a word, insane. Because I was indeed being ghosted. It was just happening in slo-mo.

“We have to reject this rejection mindset!” I yelled at Sydney while we were boogie boarding. She smiled at me and gave me a thumbs up. “We have to stop jumping to conclusions!” I continued, wild-eyed while I tried to catch a wave. Another sympathetic smile from Sydney.

Delusion, Part 2

That single text message made me so confident that I had figured out the key to one of the most agonizing aspects of romance — one partner pursuing, the other trying to find the nearest bomb shelter so they can quietly disappear, that I — get this — wrote my very first Medium story about my new theory.

Yup. I wrote a story proclaiming that every time women wonder whether men are ghosting them, they probably weren’t being ghosted at all, but instead were just suffering from messaging from the movies like He’s Just Not That Into You or for GenX, books like The Rules, which came out in the early 1990s with the unapologetic goal of helping us land husbands.

I wrote this story in an authoritative tone like I knew what the fuck I was talking about. Turns out that I did not, in fact, know what I was talking about.

I was spectacularly wrong. The end of my relationship with Ian is even more embarrassing than my delusional episode on the beach, but to sum up: he called in sick to my birthday, promised to make it up but never did. He promised we would see each other while he was off work for two weeks, we never did. Weekends went without hearing from him, then a whole week.

You may be thinking that this is a simple formula that I should have figured out much sooner, and you’d be right. But to be fair (although to whom, I don’t know) every time I mentioned breaking up, he would beg me to not leave. And I still had a vice grip on my delusional theory.

During what I now know was a slo-mo ghosting, I tried to play it cool. I tried so hard. My friends told me to act like I didn’t care, and to break up with Ian before he could break up with me so that I could “take back the power” — whatever that means. Eventually, my sanity started to return, albeit at an excruciatingly slow pace, until I finally saw through my own propaganda and just “called it” as a federal judge once told my friend Allison to do. Allison was working late into the night as a law clerk, knee-deep in complex briefs, when the judge finally looked at her and said “Look, at some point, the game is over. Someone wins, someone loses. Just call it.”

So I called it. I sent a text instructing Ian to drop my keys in my mail slot while I was at work. And he did.

Rumination of a fraud

That night, I got in a hot bath. I tried to cry. But all I could think about was that my first story for Medium promoted a truly unhinged theory, with an authoritative tone. Because really, who am I to weigh in on romance? I’m almost fifty and never been married. I’ve been dumped many, many times. Many of the men who dumped me married the next woman they dated, a pattern so alarming I’ve struggled to make sense of it and write about it, failing every time.

And even if my original ghosting theory wasn’t completely nuts (it was), who am I to confidently write a piece about romance and ghosting after consulting with just a sample of one person, consisting of well, me.

As I sat in the bath unable to cry, I ruminated about this, my mind an endless repetitive loop. Ian was almost an afterthought during this period of self-flagellation. I had to dose myself with melatonin so I wouldn’t stay up all night writing this confession. Feeling like a fraud sucks.

I’m a hacky self-appointed expert

But when I woke up a new thought occurred to me: I’m not the only one who does this. This was of some comfort, but not much. The internet is lousy with self-appointed experts. Neil Strauss, the man who taught men how to neg women for the sole purpose of tricking them into sleeping with them, is some sort of life coach now, teaching people how to transform their lives within weeks through a group called “The Society.” If this isn’t a modern-day charlatan, I don’t know what is.

Then there are the trainers, the self-described meditation coaches, the self-proclaimed DIY scientists hawking products “backed by science.” The number of people commodifying their so-called expertise (based, in my estimation, on theories they came up with in the shower) is almost too large to comprehend.

The internet compels us, almost forces us, to claim expertise. As Jia Tolentino pointed out in her brilliant book Trick Mirror, “[e]ven as we became increasingly sad and ugly on the internet, the mirage of a better online self continued to glimmer…the internet is defined by a built-in performance incentive.”

Somehow when I came back from that beach, my mind awash with insanity, I felt the undeniable urge to perform, to spread my bonkers theory to anyone who will listen. And if I’m really being honest, the tone of that piece borrowed from other pieces I’ve read on Medium that followed a simple formula: here is the conventional wisdom on something, but I the writer, had an experience or two, and now I have a different hot take to share, except don’t think of it as a hot take, think of it as solid recommendation on how to live.

Ugh. I hate myself for falling into this. I have an urge to write, I want to write. When I read essays by Jia Tolentino, or Meghan Daum or Timothy Kreider, I fangirl about their ability to pack so much into so few words, to evoke feelings I didn’t know I had. I want to do that too.

But instead, I’m in danger of becoming a hack, because I mimicked (admittedly more than once, because I have other Medium stories like this) a formula, one that I have little respect for to boot. And in doing so I promoted a theory that sucks. Granted, only 222 readers saw that story. But still. Not cool.

A reckoning

So I’m not going to do it anymore. I’m still going to write. But it will be about things that I actually, truly know about and understand: Food. Horses. The law. Why dogs are the best. Where to buy the best sheets. (Target, you’re welcome). And if I don’t have a true understanding, I’ll say as much.

The algorithm won’t be kind to this new method, because it seems the most popular subjects on Medium are variations of self-improvement: how to meditate, how to be productive, how to reject diet culture, how to handle a narcissist, how to break up, how to stay together, how to know if he’s cheating etcetera and so forth.

People are unhappy and desperate to be happy, so they gravitate to stories like this. But I’m not going to prey on them anymore. Not only do readers deserve better than someone pretending to have it all figured out, so does my writing.

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