Thread by @AliceDreger

I spent a while last night on the phone with someone who is pretty well known and being cancelled in a way that will destroy his life. I hadn't heard of him before he reached out to me with a note that made me worry he was suicidal. 1/n

I asked him to tell me his story. I know the importance of getting people who are traumatized to turn their chaos into a narrative as it helps with healing. (Thanks, Art Frank, "The Wounded Storyteller," and @JonathanMAdler for that insight.) 2/n

Then I pushed him with questions designed to make him cry (to crack), but we both ended up weeping, as often happens for me in these conversations. To hear someone who is realizing their identity is being destroyed -- it is brutal. 3/n

Then I told him the survival strategies. I told him his world will become and MUST become much smaller, for example. I told him how to draw on the person he was - the strong one - to take care of himself. That he DESERVED that care. And to read the Tao (Mitchell's esp. #9). 4/n

I told him, "Don't listen to that voice that says, 'If I kill myself, THEN they will be sorry.'" Because they won't be, and you'll be dead. And he said he had thought about just that. (We all have.) 5/n

Then he asked me how long it had been since my experience and I burst out laughing and told him I'm constantly being cancelled. I told him about the archivists and we were laugh-crying together. 6/n

"The fucking librarians came for me with pitchforks and torches, man!" I said. I told him I thought I would NEVER laugh about that, but now I laugh about that. I suggested he get a new career as an archivist and let me in, cause no one else will. 7/n

At the end he said a deep thank you. I said, "Dude, one of us is going to bed tonight NOT actively being destroyed AND with the great feeling of having helped someone. That would be me. So thank you." 8/n

And I said to myself, as I pictured myself throwing another beached starfish into the sea, walking along a shore filled with beached starfish as far as the eye can see, "Well, maybe I saved that one." /fin