I spent the first half of Mother’s Day lying to my family that I had stopped reading the comments on my first ever viral video. I spent the second half of Mother’s Day in tears over the vitriol I saw in the comments I swore I’d never read.

On Friday I posted a video where I discuss how Sigmund Freud was totally right about childhood sexual abuse until he decided to be devastatingly wrong about it. It’s a topic I’ve written about before so I knew people found it interesting, but with my Instagram account sitting pretty with 1,400 followers, I never imagined the video would be seen by more than 800,000 people.

What ensued was an emotional rollercoaster that is still making my head swirl, my bowels quake, and my fingers unable to resist my phone. One week later, I’ve been able to identify The Five Stages of Virality, as told in Broad City gifs.

Stage 1: Excitement and Relief

I felt such excitement on Friday afternoon when the video first started taking off and I broke a personal record of 15,000 views. I suddenly saw the possibilities lying ahead of me: reaching millions of people around the world to support them in their healing. I could be the Brene Brown of the CSA world! Hell, why not be an influencer while I’m at it too and throw me a bottle of hair gummies I’ll post about for thousands of dollars. The possibilities felt endless.

As the day continued, I began to feel my whole body exhale in deep relief. I started to feel like my efforts to pivot to social media as a means of supporting survivors around the world could actually work.

I decided, at age 37, to become a social media content creator because Trump got re-elected. Before November 5, I was still deep in burnout from the previous 18 months when my book was published, I became a mom, and moved across the country all at the same time.

But on November 6 I woke up with an intense clarity that lifted my professional fog. I instantly knew what role I wanted to play in supporting survivors during desperate times where our resources and services were going to be stripped away.

And that role was the one where I run my mouth and people find it helpful.

I only started posting regularly on Instagram about 5 weeks ago. I’m still experimenting and finding my footing, thanks to the guidance of my dear friend and social media coach Flint del Sol. He said so matter-of-factly that of course I’d find hundreds of thousands of people on social media who needed to hear what I had to say. Flint challenged me to dream bigger for myself and my work.

What a relief to see that Flint was right to dream big on my behalf!

My experience with my publisher promoting my book was…disappointing. I was able to cultivate more momentum from a month of posting on Instagram than the past two years of book promotion combined.

Stage 2: Elation and Dopamine Rush

By Saturday my emotions had gone from excitement to a full throttle rush. We had hundreds of thousands of views and my comments were full of people saying how much this short message meant to them. The rush of opening the app each and every time felt so thrilling; I was being fire-hosed with attention and validation unlike anything I had experienced in my previous 8 years in this field.

I couldn’t think about anything else. I pried my eyes away from my phone periodically because I knew, as a 37-year-old woman with a lot of therapy under her belt, that I had to exist in the real world with my husband and my toddler and my dog. I needed to literally touch grass. But even as I felt the cold grass under my feet as I played fetch with my dog, I thought about what I wasn’t seeing on Instagram at that moment. “How many more people have seen it?” “What are they saying?” “What comes next???”I had to force myself to ask questions about other people, to not bring up the video, and to act like a person. I needed more but I couldn’t tell you what I needed more of.

That’s when I started lying to my nearest and dearest. I’d assure them I wasn’t reading the comments and that I knew that social media isn’t real life. But my bathroom breaks started to get longer as I lost myself in the scroll.

I kept trying to wrap my head around of the numbers but they were all nonsense. I put it in Michigan terms and said to my Mom, “It’s five Big Houses worth of people who’ve seen the video.” But what’s the difference between 80,000 people versus 600,000 views? All I knew was I wanted the numbers to be higher, and they needed to be higher than whatever they were.

Flint, wisely and gently, advised me to maybe refrain from posting a video that day. He warned me about chasing a dopamine high, of wanting more for the sake of more and getting lost in the sauce. I followed his advice. I can’t imagine that when I was 25 years old I would’ve followed it. “Thank God I started this at 37,” I kept assuring myself.

Stage 3: Nausea

The nausea set in Saturday evening. I was burned out from the rush of adrenaline and dopamine and I was observing something unsettling in the bowels of my comments section. Flint had warned me for weeks about the moment I found myself in: the algorithm had already shown my content to people likely to be my kind of people, and now that it was taking off they would show it to the *general public*.

Just as I had been warned, the *general public* was terrifying. The reality of going viral was starting to creep in: for all the good that came there would also be disgusting and emboldened trolls and incels.

This, for the record, is not a “trade-off.” A trade off is when you leave a concert before the encore to beat the parking lot traffic. There are two things you want and you have to decide which one is worth sacrificing for the other. Low viewership and being free of hate speech vs. virality paired with violent misogynistic and antisemitic language directed at me are not two sides of the same coin. This is a false choice.

I should be able to reach survivors wherever they are and offer my love and support (for free, might I add!) without enduring a suffocation of hate speech. These platforms should be far safer than they are. And yet…

I told myself it was worth it. All the people I admired had to go through this, so now I was just one of them. How cool of me? It’d be okay because they were all okay…weren’t they? Wait, were they okay?

Stage 4: Devastation/Anxiety/Debilitating Fear Over The State of Humanity

By Sunday morning I was rooting for the video to die. Years ago (24 hours earlier) I turned off all notifications, so when I opened up Instagram I didn’t know what I’d be finding. As it loaded I heard a voice inside of me shout, “Get me off this goddamn rollercoaster! Tag me out.”

I no longer knew what I was rooting for. This hungry monster inside me needed to be fed with more of all of it and the healed part of me knew I needed it all to stop. I was outside my body looking down into my brain watching the wheels in my head turning and breaking at the whims of the almighty algorithm.

That’s when antisemitism really set in.

I am, for a variety of reasons, pretty immune to the fatphobic comments I got calling me a cow, telling me if they squeezed me milk would pop out of my mouth. Joke’s on them: my boobs can already do that. So many of my favorite writers, actors and content creators are fat women on the internet and I’ve grown a thicker skin as I following them throughout the years. I am fat. And for better and worse I expected this kind of hate. And although their words were intended to shame and silence me, being called fat is not an insult.

The antisemitism though.

[heaviest sigh]

I did expect some of it because I am Jewish and on the internet in the year of some people’s lord 2025, and I don’t know public Jewish people who don’t get flooded with antisemitism.

But I didn’t see this particular flavor of it coming. I didn’t know people would say I was sexually abused because I am Jewish and this is what Jewish people do to their children.

I blocked every comment I could. The sight of each new one felt like a violation, but I I could not stomach the thought of those words being underneath a video I made.

By 5pm on Sunday night I had thrice opened and shut the tab that allows a creator to block certain words from their comment section. The only word that made sense to block was “Jew.”

But Jew is not a slur. It is who I am, it is my ethnicity, my culture, my history and my religion. Sure, when people other than us use the term “Jew” it usually sends all of us into high alert that we have some hateful goy in our midst, but certainly we use the word with ease in our own community.

Would I really have to block my own identity from my comment section to keep myself safe and sane?

The question sent me over. I drew a bath for my son and watched as my tears merged with the rising bathwater. I had to finally tell Charlie, tell Flint, tell my people that I had actually kept reading the comments. And that I actually wasn’t okay.

I left a weepy voicemail for Flint and his lovely husband Xilo. As trans men on the internet with big platforms, I didn’t need to explain what this felt like to them. I instantly felt better knowing I wasn’t alone in this and that I had people in my life who understood what such an absurd and earth shattering experience this can be.

I called my friends Kate and Dip. I tried to intellectualize what I was experiencing: “Yeah, it’s really awful and disturbing and scary, but like, I know this is what happens to Jewish people on the internet, and like it happens to other identities too, not just us, and like it sucks but what can you do? I just wish it didn’t get under my skin.”

Kate gently laughed, signaling to me the absurdity of the expectations I had for myself. “If this didn’t shake you to your core, if you didn’t feel this despair at what you’ve experienced this weekend then I would be very worried,” she said. “You feel this because you are a human being and human beings aren’t supposed to go through things like this.”

My content is intensely personal. I realized that being cool with this kind of virality would only feel good if I left my humanity at the door.

Stage 5: Acceptance (…wait, really?)

By Tuesday I had actually turned off all the comments on the post and felt my nervous system re-regulating itself back to baseline. I was physically exhausted and I could tell my brain really wanted a break.

Flint told me my homework for the next week was to only post if I felt like it and if it felt good. I took that advice and ran with it and made this amazing sea lion video that no one watched. Why couldn’t this be what went viral?

Flint shared with me that, just like gambling in a casino, the algorithm would go cold on me for awhile. And just when I would begin to question again whether all this content creation effort was worth it, the algorithm would once again shine its fickle and awesome light onto me.

By Friday my views and rate of new followers came to a crawl. As a result, my compulsions to open the app also dramatically slowed down. What a relief.

But even as I type the word “relief,” that is only part of what I feel. Because there is now an irritating little insatiable monster voice in my head who is disappointed the attention has slowed down for now.

I am practicing accepting that I have no control over when this happens next and how much of a mess the rollercoaster may be. In the meantime I am taking the opportunity to put in place some safety measures.

I recruited help from the only person I could think of who I trust deeply, who does not have a marginalized identity, and is competent at social media. The Venn diagram is not robust.

This mensch of a man, Danny, was recruited this morning to be on call the next time I go viral to log into my account and read/filter/block comments on my behalf. He’s a therapist, so maybe it will even be kind of fascinating to him, in the way some people love gory horror films.

I hope it doesn’t happen for awhile and I hope it happens tomorrow. Le brain is fucked up in le head.

For now I reflect on the most irritating of truths: Flint was right about every single thing.

As Flint told me early on, we, as humans, are not designed to handle what happens when we go viral on social media. We weren’t built to know instantly that hundreds of thousands of people just heard what we had to say nor are we built to see strangers say the most unfathomably awful things to us and continue about our days.

While I worried about whether my meager 1,200 follower account would ever grow, Flint always said that it was a given and the wrong question to ask. It is not a question of whether my message will reach hundreds of thousands, maybe even millions of people; it’s a question of what happens inside my brain when it finally does.

This essay is a companion piece to Flint del Sol’s “Okay, but does this f*** with your head at all?”

News from our movement

There is so much in the news this week about Black women who have been abused and assaulted, especially with the start of the Diddy trial. We know that, due to the intersection of racism and misogyny, Black women are disproportionally harmed, are less like to be believed, and are less likely to have access to resources to find safety and healing. We here at Healing Honestly stand with Black women survivors and will continue to advocate for their safety and healing.

We recognize that the sexual violence movement was built by Black women survivors, from Marsha P. Johnson to the Black women who created one of the first rape crisis center in the country in DC, to Tarana Burke and the MeToo Movement to Aishah Shahidah Simmons and her groundbreaking work for CSA survivors, and many mores.

As a reminder, you do not need to follow the details of any trial, ever. And you can consume as much or as little of the information as you would like and it is never a reflect of how healed we are or how much we can handle. Do what’s best for you.

Alisa’s TV TWs: Another Simple Favor

This movie was fucked alllllllll the way up. Another Simple Favor the sequel to A Simple Favor was added to Prime recently and since I loved the campiness and costumes of the first movie I thought I’d give this second one a shot. The only positive thing I can say is the clothes are fun.

Content warning for sexual assault and incest, which is also a spoiler:

About 70% of the way through the movie things get really fucked up. Blake Lively’s character has a secret triplet and the triplet drugged her and raped her. And it’s played for…laughs? It’s awful. It’s fucked up and the rest of the movie is bad too. If you’re interested at all just google image Blake Lively costumes and you’ll get the only good thing this movie offers.

Unsolicited life photo

It’s the baby geese again, but look how much bigger they’ve gotten in just two weeks! I love them, I’m not over them, I’ll probably be adding more photos of their growth here whether anyone else enjoys it or not. What a threat.