Caroline Calloway, Callousness, Timshel and the Downside of Joy (When We Find it Through Cruelty)
“No one is ever going to love you because you’re fucked up.”
“Okay.”
“Say it back.”
“No.”
“Fine, then I’ll say it again. No one is ever going to love you. Because you’re fucked up.”
You will not be surprised to hear that I was bullied most of my life growing up — in multiple ways.
The first person who ever bullied me, with those same words above, again and again, was my own mother — the person who should have loved me and cared for me most in the world — who instead conditioned me to believe that she was hurting me because I was bad and I deserved it.
The second person who ever bullied me was and remains me, myself, and I.
And because I let myself be my own biggest bully, I lived the first 25 years of my life up until now letting others continue to bully me for the most part. That changed when I finally found the guts to get a restraining order against my mom in 2019, and then when I began working on being kind to myself, and demanding respect from anyone and everyone who wants to be in my life, thanks to my therapist.
When I think of my truest self, my most joyful and hopeful self, I think about this photo of me in striped leggings, clogs, and dark blue overalls when I was 3, on my favorite red slide at my favorite park in Massachusetts. She is my muse when I need to conjure that feeling, and remember there is light in me and there is light in the world.
I think that for many of us, especially the ones who have been bullied or abused in life, we are our own biggest bullies. So I won’t go into the details of why or how, and I won’t go into all of the details of the intense bullying I experienced during my life, from my mother or anyone else whether in middle school, high school, college, or even now as an adult, (which I will now label as abuse and manipulation, because that’s what it is, at the end of the day) because honestly you probably don’t need the details, and I don’t need to re-traumatize myself.
But I will say that most of the time it was so bad that I sobbed myself to sleep for large majorities of my life until I was 22. I looked at myself in the mirror and hated what I saw. I sat at the foot of my bed at night and prayed to a god that I wasn’t sure I believed in to make me someone that people would love instead of hate.
That bullying and abuse ultimately led to my OCD and anxiety bursting out of me by the time that my freshman year of high school rolled around. By ninth grade, I had developed physical manifestations of anxiety like endless stress vomiting. My chest constantly felt heavy. At the same time, I was really, really depressed and didn’t know it. It took me until college to come to terms with the mental health implications and consequences of the experiences I’d had.
It’s taken me even longer to unpack just how much the cruelty I’ve experienced in my life has affected my behavior, my habits, my friend-picking-skills, my self esteem, my ability to be kind to myself and more. I am still working hard to unlearn the instinctual pull to be unkind to myself — the pull to believe that I do not deserve better, from myself or other people.
I am lucky to be alive today, simply, because I have found a way to continue to live my life and work through the painful things other people have done to me. Not everyone has the resources and support to do that. And so, when I tell you this, I am trying to say that your cruelty, unless it is directed at literally the worst people in the world who are making the world a systemically, physically, emotionally, or otherwise worse place for the most vulnerable people, is actually misdirected hope.
It’s no secret that I’m fed up lately.
I’ve been speaking more negatively about things than I usually do. Pandemics are hard. A lot of us are fed up — just scroll through Twitter for thirty seconds and you’ll feel the mass psychic energy of fed-upness, exhaustion, and sadness that many people are feeling now. My sadness and tiredness with the current global crisis and how people have been acting in light of it is not special. I am not special. What I am is human, as are we all.
I know that one can be both hopeful and naive at the same time, or that one can be hopeful because they are naive, but I know well enough after the life I’ve led so far that correlation is definitely not causation — and so I know that while I can be naive sometimes, I am not hopeful simply because I’m naive. I’m a smart person. I don’t really feel the need to prove it by saying it but I’ll say it again — I am a smart person — because so often people have tried to strip me of the word or the reality of it, to gaslight me into believing I am not smart, simply because they found me to be too hopeful, too optimistic, my naivety derived from this hope, from the belief that we could and can still live in a better world if we are kinder and more thoughtful.
I preface what I’m about to say with these thoughts because it’s important to understand that when I approach any subject with hope and kindness or joy, I’m not coming at things from an angle of not being well-read or well-researched. I’m not coming from a perspective of not understanding the evils of white people, or capitalism, or any number of bad, violent things in the world. On the contrary, I’m coming from a place of many years of research and analysis.
I have studied the Holocaust my whole life, having majored in religion, psychology, and communications in college, but mostly studying Jewish relations and history. I have been a journalist since middle school when I helped to run the summer school paper and came in at 7 am, dedicated to learning InDesign and making graphics to go alongside stories, with my McDonald’s hash browns and all, then went on to be the editor in chief of my high school’s award winning newspaper, and am now, barely in my mid-twenties, a journalist and writer with bylines in over 15 national outlets. I have reported and written critical pieces to culture and history. I have researched the cruelest parts of history. I am not naive about what this world is or how people are.
And I preface what I’m about to say with these thoughts because I, a Diehard Hopeful, want you, perhaps a cynic, to understand that cynicism might make us feel blanketed by comfort sometimes — but it is a cold comfort, one that ultimately robs us of our own body warmth and the greater, smaller joys in life — the real comfort is facing the real reality, which is that it’s easy to be cynical.
It’s much harder to have hope, or to find joy in community and love rather than joy in punishment or pain. Because when you cling to cruelty, you feel powerful. But when you have hope, you have to change something to be able to justify that hope. You have to do the work. I am not saying by any stretch of the imagination that I’m perfect. I am very flawed. But I do not think that my hope, my joy, or my kindness are any one of my flaws. I know that they are the best thing about me.
At this point, I assume you’re wondering what any of this has to do with Caroline Calloway, or maybe if you, like some of the people in my life, are an incredibly offline person, have no idea who Caroline is or what I’m on about and just want me to get to the point so that you can find out.
Last night as I stayed up finishing articles that were due today, I took a break to go down a rabbit hole of watching old videos I made with friends in high school. They made me sad, and I started crying, mostly because I can remember so vividly how trapped and scared that person was, and could see so plainly how she let the people around her treat her poorly because she did not believe she deserved better. I think that’s often how depression and other mental illness, trauma, or even hardship function for many of us — we are cruel to others, cruel to ourselves, or allow others to be cruel to us because we somehow convince ourselves we are getting what we deserve, or that we are giving others what they deserve.
But who are we to decide this? If cruelty is a gift that some deserve because of the cruelty they have imposed on others, then who are we to be the ones to decide how they suffer? And wouldn’t our Great Deciding Abilities be better spent if we were instead the ones who decide how to uplift someone else?
Maybe I’m getting too philosophical. Probably. Fine. Whatever.
When I went back through my high school year book a few weeks ago when I was on another one of my nostalgia trips, I remembered that I was literally so fed up with people’s cruelty and bullshit in high school that I made my senior quote, my one opportunity to use a really, really good deep quote about the world or some shit, to quote that line about cake from Mean Girls. Look, I am who I am and I regret nothing I guess.
Here’s the part where I get to Caroline. Back when all the scammer stuff started a few years ago, I remember it unfolding on my timeline as the journalist who originally threaded about it on Twitter is someone I follow. I saw a lot about her online and continued to ignore it, as I do with most discourse and gossip, until the Natalie piece on The Cut came out last year. Everyone on my timeline was talking about it, praising Natalie and trashing Caroline — how hard it must have been for Natalie to go through what she did, how cruel Caroline, framed as a wealthy white girl without an ounce of accountability, was to Natalie. But it wasn’t just those takes that I saw — it was people who I usually see championing the de-stigmatization of mental health issues, talking about how important it is to be kind to people, totally trashing this girl who was telling the world that her former best friend had sold a gossipy, mean essay about her to an internationally known and read magazine for thousands of dollars. And for what?
Before you get annoyed with me like so many people online have every time I bring this up, and say “BUT ELLY! She’s rich. And petty. How can you feel bad for her? What the fuck are you on?” please hear me out.
I get it. She’s rich. Rich people don’t really need us to defend them — especially not rich, privileged white women. But I’m not defending her wealth or her whiteness. Simply put, I want to take a look at her humanity — at all of us as humans. I do believe in punching up, but I don’t think that beating on Caroline Calloway until she got a huge book deal and online following of millions was punching up the way many thought it was.
When I first read the Natalie piece, and read people’s responses on the timeline, I admit I was on Natalie’s “side.” I, like Natalie, had been the “victim” of so many bad friendships with rich girls or not-even-rich-but-just-mean-and-entitled-girls during my life. I used to be very woe is me about it. Then I grew up. Not because I wanted to but because I had to — and I had to take personal responsibility for the friendships I chose to stay in — some which were much, much worse and more damaging, objectively, than the Caroline and Natalie friendship. Did I air it out for New York Magazine? Nope. Is it because none of those girls were known influencers on Instagram who’d had journalistic hit pieces written on them? Sure. But it’s also because there’s a difference between justice and revenge. So when I read the Natalie piece a few more times, and then continued to scroll through my timeline seeing nasty take after nasty take about Caroline, I couldn’t help but feel this specific pit in my stomach. What is the point of being so cruel to someone who absolutely none of us know through anything but Instagram stories?
Sure, you can claim that we know her because of her scams or all of the articles on her or whatever. But I don’t actually believe that. As someone who has led a life much larger than what can be fit in tweets or Instagrams or single articles or even series of articles, and who has lived a life posting on social media platforms frequently, I’m all too aware of just how much social media posts and other kinds of content will never capture the full picture, no pun intended.
When Caroline joined Twitter and then, over the last few months and now weeks, began to tease out her Natalie response essay drop, the rush of Caroline Calloway chatter came back to the timeline all at once, with many people making cruel comments about her, as if she’s not a person with real feelings. Now what I’m not saying is that we should never hold people accountable for bad things they’ve done. I’m not saying we should rush to defend privileged white people.
What I’m actually trying to say is not about Caroline at all, to be plain. It’s about the fact that, honestly, Caroline could be any rich white girl anywhere, and there are a million more like her, maybe dealing with their own mental health issues, perhaps being held accountable for shitty things they’ve done in the past in their own ways. You’re not trash talking them on Twitter, are you? No, probably not. And why? Because you don’t know them. And you aren’t going to get likes for it. And you’re not going to feel some pseudo sense of moral high ground. And at the end of the day, why do we do anything publicly?
Because we want an audience, of course.
So when I say that it frustrates me to see almost everyone, even some of the people I think of as the most kind people in the world, jump on the Trash Talk Train going express to Caroline Calloway Land, what I actually mean is that I’m tired of seeing people be cruel for the fun of it.
One of the first days back to college during a year when I’d just come out of an enormously painful summer of houselesness and abuse, I sobbed myself to sleep on the dorm room floor of one of my then-best friends because I’d just found out that, on top of the immense pain I’d just experienced and the poverty that was eating me from the inside out and ruining my mental health, which I had told almost no one at school about, that a group of people who I had once considered some of my best friends had been plotting to blackmail me and get me kicked out of school, which was the only refuge and hope I’d had at escaping the hell of a life I was attempting to crawl out of.
I think about this photo of me when I was a little kid a lot. I can’t remember the exact context. I just knew I wanted my mom and dad to stop taking photos of me all the time, and I wanted someone to listen to me. Every time I’m having a hard day, I think of this photo. I think of printing it on a t-shirt with the words “LEAVE ME ALONE, I AM NOT IN THE MOOD TODAY” in big letters on both the front and back. Maybe someday I will.
I cried myself to sleep because it was clear to me that a bunch of college students who had once been my friends had some petty drama they hadn’t worked out with me, and instead of letting it go and moving on, they decided it was entertaining to try to hurt me, and that they were the people who deserved the opportunity to hurt me.
The downside to cruelty is that we think it’s our right to be the punishers, the cruel ones, in the first place.
The downside to joy is that sometimes it comes at the expense of someone else’s happiness — like when, for example, your joy in partaking in a social media trend of trash talking some presumably rich girl who has stated time and time again that she struggles with mental health and suicidal ideation, that parts of her childhood scarred her in ways she’s still trying to work through, because you think it doesn’t matter, and because you’re just having fun. Caroline herself has talked about her intense mental health battles, she’s been vulnerable in this way completely publicly, knowing the world would tear her down. And we took her up on that offer.
The downside to joy is that sometimes you should be going to an entirely different Joy Bodega, paying with a different currency, and buying a different Joy Juice. The downside to joy is that sometimes you’re actually being an asshole.
You’re not being an asshole because you want to be, I know. Neither am I. I forgive you. And I forgive me. You and I are sometimes assholes, finding joy at the expense of others, because we are human, and because as humans we often deal with our own numbness, confusion, or pain by taking it out on others — displacement is a bitch.
My most favorite thing about people has always been our capacity for change. My least favorite thing about people has always been our denial of and refusal to see the ripples of our behavior and actions in the world, and how far one cruel word or action can go.
It’s always been odd to me to see people’s reaction in times of high stress to be displacing their own fears and anxieties through cruelty to others. I’ve seen it play out in small scales, in high school and beyond, even as an adult — seeing people take their pain and hurt others with it, because they are bored or tired or dealing with something else they don’t want to work through yet. And I’ve seen it play out in viral, large scale ways those cruel World War III memes on Twitter and Instagram three months ago, when people thought their fear over a potential war with Iran meant it was okay to make memes at the expense of real vulnerable people put at risk by American imperialism, that their fear was more important than anyone else’s.
If you’re wasting your time dabbling in petty drama because it feels fun and temporarily joyful, and you are being cruel at the expense of someone who is just as human as you, and who you actually have no way of knowing what their experiences in life have been, you are simply wasting your time and energy when you could be using it to uplift someone else.
You genuinely hate Caroline Calloway? Or another random person? Or a friend who pissed you off or maybe even did something really hurtful and objectively shitty? And you think that you need to be one of the people who punishes them, right? Alright, fine then. I can believe you have some hate up your sleeve. But I don’t actually believe that you needing to hurt them is about them. It’s about you. Because I believe that cruelty, in many ways, is performative. So is kindness. Whatever. If I’m going to be performative I’d rather be performative in a way that supports people than in a way that hurts them.
Look, maybe Caroline is truly a scammer and her mental health issues are all a grift. Perhaps. But I don’t believe that, as someone who has experienced mental health issues at levels of intensity I would never wish on anyone. I know people who have struggled with the insides of their brains when I see them. Furthermore, Caroline Calloway may have done a lot of bad things, but unlike Natalie’s grift for personal fame and comeuppance, decided to forgo selling her response piece to an outlet for $10,000 and instead decided to drop the piece exclusively on her website behind a paywall to raise money for people in need of it during the pandemic. It might just be a marketing ploy. She might be doing something genuinely selfless. Who cares? She’s putting her money where her mouth is. Are you?
◥◤Caroline Calloway @carolinecaloway
Nonetheless, the point I am trying to make is that joy is double-edged. It is much better used to help than to hurt. It is much better to feel no joy from not doing or saying anything about a random girl on the internet who has never done anything to you, and who is forced to see every unkind thing that anyone has ever decided to post on the internet, than to feel joy from being cruel. So you genuinely hate Caroline Calloway? Okay, cool.
Why do you hate her? Is it because she’s a mean rich person who tricked her way into getting internet famous? Give your time and money to someone who doesn’t have resources and whose voice has been silenced. You’re mad that she’s getting attention for being mentally ill? Alright, go give money or volunteer your time to a crisis text line and help people who need resources more than Caroline. Is it because she’s an easy target for some upset or anger you feel about other injustices in the world that you’re projecting onto her because you have nowhere else to put it? Okay, write it in a Google doc or journal until you figure out what it is about your feelings that you actually need to work through. What I’m saying is that when we obsessively choose to trash talk people and tear them down instead of working on ourselves, we think we’re the ones winning — but we’re not.
Everyone’s losing. But most of all, we are.
Most of my life has been made miserable by people who had their own bullshit to deal with, from their own trauma or pain, who decided that they simply couldn’t bare it alone, and that they needed to place their burdens on me — and so they have been cruel, or thoughtless. I’m not sure which is worse.
And I’m sure that when I have hurt people on accident, it has mostly been because I was not dealing with my own bullshit as well as I should have been. That is the price we pay as humans.
But my point is exactly this.
Your bullshit, my bullshit — the insecurities, the worries, the anger towards capitalism or the government or the shitty rich white girls in your own life who have been unkind to you — doesn’t need to be spilled out into the world, towards other people who will continue to be hurt by it. Hurt people hurt people, yada yada yada. It’s cliche but it’s true.
I have a tattoo on my right wrist that says “timshel,” which is Hebrew and also from the John Steinbeck novel East of Eden. In essence, it can be summed up as meaning “thou mayest.” Thou mayest sin. Thou mayest be cruel. Thou mayest be unkind. But “thou mayest,” inherently, provides a choice — if thou mayest, thou mayest not.
The one thing I have learned in my life is that the cycles of pain and cruelty stop with us, when we decide we want them to.
It is much better, I think, to decide that your energy is better spent finding ways to support people than to tear other people down. I’m not trying to tell you to go apologize or be nice to Caroline Calloway. This essay isn’t actually about Caroline at all, in the end.
It’s about how we can all be better people, every day of our lives.
We can wake up, decide that the cruelty people have imposed on us does not have to be passed on.
We can recycle it, and find it within ourselves to search for the upside of joy — the constant move towards the joy of healing, the constant move towards the joy of holding ourselves as accountable as we can to being kind to others, and in the process, becoming more kind to ourselves.
I think, no I know, that we are all redeemable in the end. We just have to give both ourselves and others the chance to be.
I am not telling you or even asking you to forgive every person who has ever hurt you. Hell, I could never do that myself. I am saying there are more constructive things you can do with that pain than try to tear them down.
So I hope that today you find one way to be kind to yourself. I hope that today you find one way to be kind to someone you perhaps don’t think deserves your kindness. I hope you understand these things are, at the end of it all, the only true legacies we leave behind.
