Escaping the Spin

This has been weighing on me for a while now. If you know me, then you know I worked in media for a good handful of years. What had begun as a gig writing health articles and editing self-help and personal enrichment pieces evolved into nothing but writing right-wing politics. It wasn’t what I’d signed up for, but it was all I had until some other remote job finally came along.

It eventually eroded my spirit, leaving me constantly anxious and depressed and worsening my mental health—life-long struggles with agoraphobia being one of multiple issues. I became withdrawn, having the emotional bandwidth to do nothing beyond work and my own writing (which will always be my “work,” no matter what my day job might be). My mantra became, “I am NOT Winston Smith… I am NOT Winston Smith…,” but deep down, I knew that was a lie.

I need to say this, because I need you to understand something that is so, so important right now: Every piece of “news” you read these days—especially if you get it from a source pushed through a social media outlet—has been written by some poor sap who was assigned the title and likely made a fraction of minimum wage to spin it whatever way their boss wanted it. Please note that the writer of that extremely political article you just read might have been searching classified ads for new jobs as they wrote it. They might have ugly-cried the entire time, because they so fervently believed against its message, then spent way too much time decompressing afterward.

That’s right, whenever you read the “news,” there’s a good chance that even the person who wrote it thought it was bullsh*t. They might have written it because they had no other job and needed the paycheck. Maybe they felt loyal to their employers and prayed their particular content mill would shift gears into a more tolerable area once again. Some media writers buy into the spin, but I’d be willing to bet most of them are pretending, in their minds, that they’re writing fiction every day in hopes of somehow sleeping at night.

I am NOT Winston Smith… not anymore. And that’s why I must share a new message as loudly as I possibly can: Don’t buy into the divide. It only exists until we all choose to ignore the spin. Choose, instead, to remember the kinship—the brotherhood and sisterhood in humanity—that unites every one of us.