Lindsay Ellis

On December 29, 2021, Ellis made a Patreon post that read:

Walking away from Omelas

This was going to be a YouTube video, but I just don’t have it in me to invite that kind of scrutiny, to be the last in the sick, sad line of YouTubers who get all weepy on camera and cry about how they just can’t do this anymore, boo hoo hoo. I had planned to move video content to Nebula, but I realize now that doing that is just keeping wounds wide open. My life ended nine months ago - what has been taking up bandwidth ever since then has been a ghost. It’s almost funny, how many people will insist that I have "lost nothing" (you know, because subscriber count is the only metric for success and cancel culture doesn't exist). One YouTube channel chugging along on algorithmic inertia is not success - it’s just an engine driving on fumes.

Many will say this is being melodramatic, that my live isn’t over, that there was absolutely nothing stopping me from brushing myself off, building back up goodwill and shutting up and playing the game. And I tried that; in a way I suppose it’s good that I did, because I needed to learn the hard way that that was never going to work. There is no un-fucking this. You can’t find the energy if there is nothing left to convert to it. You can’t be a better person if you are nothing but the hollow shell of one.

2021 has been the worst year of my life. I am traumatized by it. To this day I still have people scolding me by how I handled it, that I should have handled it differently, that I should have “controlled” my “stans”, as if I had the capability to know what any of these people were even saying to strangers on Twitter while I was shitting blood for weeks on end. The worst thing about this whole thing is that I can’t even admit this trauma because of all the rhetorical devices people have already come up with to dismiss it.

That centering my own pain is evidence of “not listening” (does it occur to these people that you can listen, and disagree with other people’s conclusions?) That I’m weaponizing my “fragile white womanhood” or whatever to say that having thousands upon thousands of people who you have never met hate you and say whatever will get them the most updoots is traumatizing. That people I used to know would sit there and lie about me on Twitter dot com to the tune of thousands of retweets and tens of thousands of likes, and I just had to sit there and take it. My favorite are the people who dismiss any potential harm I might have incurred as justified because I am a “wealthy, white woman” (I am not wealthy), while these same people’s hearts positively bleed for Britney Spears.

These people don’t see how similar these talking points are to the same Boomer, bootstrap parenting style that I thought most of us had agreed was abusive - that you need to toughen up, accept your punishment, accept that even if the reaction was outsized that you did SOMETHING wrong, because where there’s smoke there’s fire. Grow a thicker skin. These same people who always crow about “believing victims” telling victims of public dogpiles that they do not deserve to claim their trauma, let alone to process it, because they deserved it. There is no such thing as cancel culture. There is no incentive/reward structure in places like Twitter to call people out. There are no updoots/favs/follows/retweets for hotting a take on whomever is trending.

I reread the 2015 essay “Hot Allostatic Load” for the first time in years last night, and I could not stop crying. Even reading some of these passages now, I can’t stop crying. This was written from the perspective of a trans femme and discusses some rhetorical devices used to demonize trans women specifically, which obviously does not apply to me, but some of it is spot on:

One of the most common tools of exclusion is through mobbing, which is rarely talked about because unlike rape, murder, etc, it’s not easy to pin it on a single person (or scapegoat). Mobbing is emotional abuse practiced by a group of people, usually peers, over a period of time, through methods such as gaslighting, rumor-mongering, and ostracism. It’s most documented in workplace or academic environments (i.e. key points of capitalist tension) but is thoroughly institutionalized into feminist, queer, and radical spaces as well. Here is why it is horrible:

1. It has an unusually strong power to damage the victim’s relationship to society, because it can’t be written off as an outlier, as some singular monster. It reveals a fundamental truth about people that makes it difficult to trust ever again. People become like aliens, like a pack of animals that can turn on you as soon as some mysterious pheromone shift marks you for death.
2. The insidious nature of emotional abuse: How do you fight ostracism and rumors? They leave no bruises, they just starve you.
3. Mobbing typically occurs in places where the victim is trapped by some need or obligation: work, school, circles of friends. This can prolong exposure to damaging extremes.

For these reasons, PTSD is an almost inevitable outcome of any protracted mobbing case.

The Isabel Fall case is almost a textbook example about how online mobbing harms people, and how the people who participate in these mobs never engage in any self-reflection — when some people read Fall’s “Helicopter Story” and questioned the trans bonafides of the author in early 2020, Twitter did what Twitter does and ruined Fall’s life, death by a million cuts, no one single person even beginning to question whether they did anything wrong by jumping to the worst possible faith interpretation of both the text and the author. After a profile written by Emily VanDerWerff was published late in 2021, were lessons learned about the way we use Internet mobs to tear down people we don’t know because of situations we don’t understand? No — one of Fall’s detractors, Neon Yang, became the new scapegoat du jour, using some of the exact same tactics used the prior year to attack Fall.

I’m not going to touch on Yang’s original comments about Fall or the pushback to them, but what was downright charming in its lack of self-awareness about that whole situation was the way people used Fall’s trauma to hurt Yang, the way they invoked Fall being checked into the hospital while Yang said whatever about Fall and “Helicopter Story”, all while having absolutely no idea what was going on in Yang’s private life. What’s particularly galling is how many people accused Yang of “Sending a trans person to the hospital with PTSD” while apparently being completely oblivious to the fact that they could be very well doing the same thing to Yang, a nonbinary trans person. There was no lesson learned on the nature of mindless dogpiling, just Twitter doing what Twitter does - failing to examine systems of abuse while continuing to perpetuate them by laying into a new scapegoat.

Again, a quote from Hot Allostatic Load:

Feminist/queer spaces are more willing to criticize people than abusive systems because they want to reserve the right to use those systems for their own purposes. At least attacking people can be politically viable, especially in a token system where you benefit directly by their absence, or where your status as a good feminist is dependent on constantly rooting out evil.

When the bounty system calls for the ears of evil people, well, most people have a fucking ear.

Something else that was also inevitable - I was going to quit YouTube. I knew I couldn’t do it forever, that I was running out of steam, that I was sick of the increasing dehumanization inherent, that I just didn’t have anything to say about movies anymore. The plan was always to end with Love Never Dies, since it seemed like the best place to end, with some semblance of energy rather than keeping on until I've withered away to nothing. What happened to me in March and April hastened it, but this was always inevitable.

My initial plan was to leave YouTube for Nebula, but I realize now that this is only entrenching myself in a more intimate form of harm rather than the broad, buckshot kind that YouTube invites. I won’t go into detail (not right now, anyway), but I can’t do video content for them either. I can’t make content period. I just can’t do this anymore. There is no healing as long as there is attachment to the thing that makes you suffer, and the thing in this case is being in the public eye at all.

What I wanted was to quietly disappear, but since this is a platform where people are paying me to make content, I feel like I have to make a statement. If it were just me by myself I would just sign off and say goodbye and that would be it, but I have a team who depends on my company for health insurance, and including dependents I supply full benefits for eight people, and here in the US employer-based insurance is often the only feasible option. Saying to everyone “sorry about your children, but they can’t have insurance anymore because Twitter makes me sad” just doesn’t seem like a fair deal (none of them incidentally know I’m posting this).

So the only thing I can do for now is keep this page active with the loose promise that someday I’ll figure out something in the future to make up for this, while asking you please stop messaging me apologizing for not being able to subscribe anymore. You don’t owe me anything. This Patreon is, like my own life and career, just running on fumes.

But all I know now is that being in the public eye at all is a losing game, and I regret all of it. I regret every time I’ve ever stood up for anyone - it always backfires. I regret every time I pushed back against something unjust - it was always just used to hurt me. I regret every time I ever stood up for myself - I never did it “correctly.” I regret every time I showed any vulnerability - just more ammunition to be used against me later. I regret every time I ever tried to play the game with peers and colleagues - they will drop you the second you aren't popular on Twitter anymore. It’s all hollow and brittle, and if there is one thing I have learned this year it is how eminently expendable I am. The good, progressive cis, straight, wealthy white men keep on trucking and coming out on top because deep down, they know that the systems they profess to stand against ultimately exist to benefit them.

And to all the people telling me I need to grow a thicker skin or remove myself from the conversation altogether - you are right. I don’t have it in me to do the former, so I shall do the latter.

Hope your new year is better than this.^[17]