I'm Sorry Glennon
The same bullies who ran a successful writer off Substack are why don't have a Kamala Harris presidency.
At the risk of being another person posting about Glennon Doyle leaving Substack after a week, I’m here to share my complicated feelings about her, apologize, and do what she can’t do: call out feminists on their Mean Girl bullshit.
With that spicy intro out of the way, here’s a quote that disarms me in my most righteous moments:
“When you point your finger at someone, remember: three fingers are pointing back at you.”
Such a simple phrase. And so easy to forget when our insecurities blindside us.
Please know this quote applies to me as I prepare to sling criticism at strangers. As I point my finger, please know that I see the three others pointing back at me.
My feelings for her Glennon are complicated. I love her and sometimes I’m annoyed by her. In her words: my feelings for Glennon are and/both. Not either/or.
Who’s Glennon Doyle?
A week ago last Friday, I woke up to a notification that Glennon Doyle joined Substack.
Glennon is one of my favorite American authors. I’ve read all of her books and listened to many episodes of her award-winning We Can Do Hard Things podcast she hosts with her wife, Abby, and her sister, Amanda. My mom and I went to see her speak at a live event in 2016 after she and her book Love Warrior came out.
I don’t buy many books, due to limited finances and space to store them. Plus, it’s hard to get English books in Spain, and my library access is abundant. But when Glennon releases a new book, I always buy a copy.
Glennon is a memoirist and poet who writes about addiction recovery, parenting, and the challenges we all face to live authentically within societal expectations. She’s not often credited as a humorist, but she’s very funny. She started writing as a Christian mommy blogger and has evolved into a Queer activist and feminist. She uses her power to push against the world to make it a safer place for everyone.
Glennon Doyle could run for public office and win—but only if feminists will ever allow a successful, well-spoken woman to lead them.
Being a best-selling author, she has a massive fan base. She uses her influence for good, founding a charity and featuring lesser-known authors from historically marginalized backgrounds on her platforms. That last sentence sucks to write because unlike men, women have to justify their capitalist success by also doing altruistic good. I only include that information as evidence against the indictments she faced last week. Her crimes? Wanting to create and connect with her community as a famous, living-and-breathing artist.
Glennon is one of my writing heroes. If ever got to be in a room with her,
, and , I don’t think I could hold my shit together. If I met any of them face-to-face, I’d probably burst into tears and say something banal, like:“Thank you for being you and for creating and sharing your art.”
“Thank you for inspiring me and others to show up in the world.”
“Thank you for inspiring me to create.”
If any of you are reading, I mean every one of those words. Thank you a million times over. If you feel inspired to do so, please keep making art. May you be paid obscene amounts of money for it or gain abundant satisfaction, whatever you need to keep creating.
Fan Girl Sideswiped by Big Feels
Given my profound admiration for her, you’d think that seeing Glennon was on Substack would bring me joy, as it did for hundreds of thousands of newcomers and long-haulers. I am not proud to admit: it did not.
I felt immediately threatened by her presence. In her first eight hours on this platform, she surpassed all my wildest growth dreams. She gained hundreds of thousands of paying subscribers while I slept.
I ranted to my husband about it over morning coffee. I whined righteously about how unfair it felt for us underdogs to share space with a big creative who’s a bestselling, big-five-published author. I was annoyed by her self-deprecating comments about not knowing how Substack works (“It kinda looks like you do.”) I interpreted her newbie curiosity as false humility. I didn’t like it on a visceral level.
My feelings weren’t a conscious choice. They were a subconscious reaction.
Spewing out my lizard-brain reactions cleared some space in my brain. My prefrontal cortex took over, and I realized: my feelings came from scarcity. The fear of not-enoughness. The fear that Glennon being here meant no one would read my words. These feelings originate from deeply insecure places in me. They are not a reflection of her.
Feelings Are Not Facts
Women have long been dismissed as being emotionally irrational. We are told not to trust our intuition. We get angry when we realize the damage that distrusting ourselves has caused. We swear to do things differently. We swing to the other extreme in trying to deprogram ourselves from dismissing our feelings. We let feelings be facts.
In talking through my feelings, I realized an important fact: Glennon has every right to be on Substack or any platform of her choosing.
Another fact: if Glennon's content annoyed me, I could just not read it. Or block her.
The Internet being what it is, and me being a woman daring to share an opinion while balancing the potentiality of being canceled, I said nothing. At the time, all I could see was hundreds of thousands of women rightfully celebrating her arrival.
If I shared anything nuanced, I was afraid Glennon’s audience would come for me, like ruthless Swifty renegades (I’m a big Taylor Swift fan—if you’re offended by that, you need to calm down.)
Envy Loves Company
There was no merit in me posting my complicated feelings about Glennon being here, so I kept them to myself and went on with my day. I didn’t think about her being here until I saw
’s note:The same part of me that reacted to Glennon’s arrival on a visceral level felt relieved when I read this. erin was naming feelings and taking responsibility for them. erin was pointing her finger at Glennon AND acknowledging the three fingers pointing back at her.
I did not think sharing my two cents in a restacked note could be part of a tidal wave of female insecurity that I assume led Glennon to leave Substack. I hope it wasn’t.
Being in company with others who love Glennon and own their feelings about her being here felt good. It felt like the right place to interact because no one was using language to tell Glennon how to be or act, only that they had feelings about her presence.
And then, armed with feelings as facts, the tone police arrived.
Here Come the Haters Masquerading as Feminists
The TL;DR summary of this note is: “Big fan has big feels about a big writer coming to Substack.” The author starts by owning her insecurities, just as I did. Then she says, “I am not saying your arrival is wrong…” and then proceeds to tell her how her arrival would have been right.
Glennon's one-week stint on Substack perfectly illustrates an ugly truth: we would rather tear each other down than lift each other up. A successful female writer joins the platform with a warm welcome, then faces criticism for the crime of not doing it "the right way." The backlash reeks of exclusionary NIMBY (Not In My Back Yard) energy, as if Substack were some feminist fiefdom rather than a social media platform. Glennon wasn't violating content guidelines—she was shunned by feminists who would rather point fingers than examine their insecurities.
These women, including me at first, completely missed the point that "all ships rise with the tide"—Glennon's presence brought hundreds of thousands of new readers to this platform who may have discovered our work if we hadn’t chased them away.
This behavior pattern is exactly why we now have Donald Trump as president instead of Kamala Harris. While women tear each other apart for not being perfect enough, incompetent men who actively seek to damage everything become our elected officials. Women hold each other to impossible standards while men fail upward. We earned exactly the president we deserve because we love the schadenfreude of tearing successful women down more than we love lifting each other up Our insecurity keeps costing us our power and peace, over and over again.
Only when women are willing to accept differences and imperfections will feminism, which is to say gender equality, have a fighting chance.
Dear Glennon
If you’re reading this, I’m sorry I didn’t speak up for you before you left Substack. I learned too late that the haters took aim at you. I missed my chance to do for you what you’ve done for millions of us: validate your right to be in creative community.
Glennon has a book coming out this week that she co-authored with her wife Abby and her sister Amanda: We Can Do Hard Things: Answers to Life’s 20 Questions. You can pre-order it here or sign up for her newsletter.
Before she left, Glennon and Liz Gilbert had a delightful conversation on Substack:
Most comments on the posts and notes about Glennon’s brief Substack stint have been echo chambers of agreement. I’d love to hear your thoughts, especially if they don’t conveniently fit a binary, right/wrong, pro/against stance. Authentic nuance is welcome. Be respectful or be blocked.
I was so excited when I saw Glennon here, and I gobbled up everything she posted, and I’m devastated to hear that she’s left.
There is room for all of us here, which you’ve mentioned in your post and I appreciate that. I also appreciate you being transparent about how you felt.
But I’m gonna reiterate what I tell a lot of people that get upset or worried or jealous when big names come on Substack with hundreds of thousands of followers. *****They uploaded their list.***** They didn’t amass thousands of followers overnight. All they did was import their newsletter list to Substack. It took them years and years and years to develop that list. They put in the time and the effort, unless of course there are a Kardashian. And I really want people to understand this! I know because I have a different account, and I uploaded my list that took me 10+ years to gather. It’s small in comparison, but if someone looked and saw that on day one I had 6500 followers, they might be upset.
I really am devastated to hear that Glennon was bullied off this platform, especially since it’s the only place that I’ve ever felt safe.
I really appreciated this, Rachel. Especially this:
"Women hold each other to impossible standards while men fail upward. We earned exactly the president we deserve because we love the schadenfreude of tearing successful women down more than we love lifting each other up."
That is a very hard pill to swallow, isn't it? How I wish people were different.
As a man who likes but doesn't like Glennon Doyle, my reactions were similar to yours: "Oh shit, no cake for me." Not that I'm competing with Glennon, mind you, but I imagine you don't see yourself as doing that either. Which is exactly the problem: Do we really need to create a sense of scarcity where one isn't warranted? I think that that is what we really need to focus on here on Substack if we are to stay sane.