Becoming a low-key public person

An exercise in bravery and agency

Photo by Andrej Lisakov on Unsplash

I have a fraught relationship with social media. I enjoy it, in bite-sized doses, and spend as much time negotiating use of it with my teens as I do using it myself. Unless you count my time on WhatsApp arranging one million things (carpools, gifts, dinners, my mom’s care, family gatherings, all the people who need to see cute pictures of my dog), I am not a heavy user. This is a fairly unusual stance for a journalist. 

I was trained as a finance reporter in the mid oughts at the New York Times. Our mission was to hold power to account and break news. The main ways we did that was to find and cultivate sources and get out of the office into real life. I reported 9/11 by seeing and smelling and witnessing the horror of it, and meeting the people whose lives it had shattered. In 2007, I reported the financial crisis by spending time with people whose homes were foreclosed on. I spent a lot of time in Wall Street’s towering skyscrapers talking to executives who magically took mortgage debt and concocted weird securitized instruments to be sold to grannies as safe and solid. I covered Hurricane Sandy by witnessing the wreckage. 

Maybe this all makes me seem old (um, I am). But stay with me: this post is about my trying to be brave. It’s about actually having to use the agency that I claim in my book is vital to human thriving. 

When Twitter came along, and a newsroom newbie came to brief us on it, a lot of us complained. If we spent our days scrolling through other people’s random thoughts and musings, wouldn’t we lose time getting out of the building and reporting? How would we break stories? It seemed antithetical to what we did. Journalism, for good or ill, was not just conducted at desks and on the internet. 

Suffice it to say, my instincts on that were epically wrong. Twitter, for a good long while, was a wonderful discovery mechanism: for other people’s work and ideas, for stories and sources, for promoting my own work and asking questions. It became a powerful reporting tool, essential to the work of modern day journalism. While I didn’t lean in as much as I could have, I was fluent enough. 

Then a few things happened. I switched from covering finance, which is a blood sport, to covering education, which is not. A few years later I quit the NYT to join Quartz. I moved to the UK. My brother died, and then my dad died and then my mom got sick. Post 2016 Twitter, and social media in general, felt more vitriolic and angry, as well as confessional and deeply personal. I had no interest in sharing my life and certainly not my kids’ lives with the world. And, my nervous system could not handle the hate. I’ve always valued nuance—a lot of life is gray if you look close enough—and nuance was not celebrated on the internet. 

I was trained to never make the story about me. But at Quartz, in 2016, I saw how a different media landscape was developing. The reporters were younger and savvier about social media. The pace of journalism meant most spent their days at their desks reporting. A few of my editors suggested I write about my own life and experiences (which freaked me out) and to offer opinions on things (a fireable offense back in the day at the NYT, if you were not on the opinion pages). I adjusted, writing a few deeply personal things and also leaning into all the new and shiny tools of media (audience engagement, SEO optimization, Google Trends). I missed knowing that the president was reading (or being briefed on) my breaking stories, but I loved the emerging democracy of more voices. 

But there was a cost. With our new social media mediums (Insta! TikTok!) came round-the-clock, precise and unforgiving metrics. Chartbeat, likes, shares, engagement. Don’t get me wrong: I loved when my stories went viral. But it was very clear that living by the tyranny of the new ticker tape made most of the journalists around me miserable. 

At this moment, I was older than most of them. I had two small kids, and I was in the mess that is midlife. So while I dug in to optimizing my headlines and writing into the moment, I also made a protective call to keep a healthy distance. And I’ve more or less kept that distance. Until recently, I had a personal Instagram page with my closest friends and family where I shared pictures of my kids and our travels and my life. I use Facebook intermittently, like when my mom fell down a flight of stairs or when my dad died. LinkedIn felt a good place to see what people were doing professionally. When Twitter became X, and even more toxic, I just left. I sometimes missed the urge to share random thoughts, but the world was saved from a lot of my half-baked ideas. 

When I decided to write a book in 2021, I retreated further away rather than lean in. I read more than ever, but participated less in public discussions. Amanda Ripley, a veteran journalist, wrote in 2022 that she had started to avoid the news. Too often she found she was “marinating in despair.” In the aftermath of George Floyd’s killing, Covid, and Jan 6 I wanted to be informed. But I had reached peak marination. 

Two years later I finished the book and looked around. I had a mountain of ideas and reporting to share; a new framework for understanding and tackling teen disengagement and deep insights from an army of adolescents who took the time to talk to me. Also, the book is about helping kids to develop agency. I realized I too had some. Social media is a key dialect in the language of my world — media. I can put my work and myself into the world, or let it die on a shelf. If it feels inauthentic, and uncomfortable at times, it’s because I haven’t used my agency to define the terms on which I plan to engage. 

So that’s what I am doing….or trying to do. To come out of the shell, but also to keep some boundaries. I can write about myself sometimes, but dive into issues and research and news the rest of the time. I can have some privacy and also be a public-ish person (or as my daughter might say: a lowkey public person). I can do meaningful work and explore TikTok and make pretty posts for Instagram. I can find joy in the noise. 

I don’t know why it took me so long to jump back in. I suspect it just had a lot to do with a steady diet of grief, some geographic and career changes, and a desire to reconnect with my kids after working too much for the first decade of their lives. At some point, it became easier to stay out. But I am ready to get back in, on my terms.  

My dad was a beautiful writer and a master of the philosophical, hyper-practical one-liner. One of my favorites is: “You can’t catch yesterday’s fish.” I try hard to live by that one. We’re not here long enough to stew in regrets. Learn from them, sure. Repair any damage done, absolutely. But spend our time agonizing about what we didn’t do? No thank you. Maybe I should have been more on social media all these years, building up a following, and architecting my brand. 

Or maybe my brand was in formation, and now it’s ready for primetime.