Your critics aren't even in the arena. Fuck em.
The critics are never building anything worth criticizing. That’s the reason they have time to be critics.
I have this stupid cognitive tic that I'm not proud of, but luckily I'm not alone with it either. It's actually super common and I don’t think anyone is immune. I bet you’ve felt it, too.
It doesn't matter how famous or rich or successful you are, it will find you at some point. You make something, you put it out, and the response is mostly good. People engage, share it, tell you it hit something real for them… and then two people say something awful. Maybe it's a comment that misses the point so completely you wonder if they even read the same thing you wrote, or a quote-tweet that strips your words of all context and presents them to an audience primed to be outraged, or a DM from someone who decided your existence is a personal affront. Whatever it is, without fail, no matter how many good responses you got, those two shitty comments are the ones you're still thinking about at midnight.
I’ve watched this happen to people I respect and I’ve watched it happen to me across every platform I’ve ever used, which at this point is most of them. A Substack essay that gets two dismissive comments out of two hundred thoughtful ones. An Instagram post that finds its way to a corner of the internet that hates you specifically. A shitpost on X that someone decides to take completely literally and then screenshots for an audience that’s already decided who you are. A podcast clip that gets clipped at exactly the wrong moment, stripped of thirty minutes of context, and dropped into a timeline full of people who’ve never heard of you and now have very strong feelings about you. A product launch where someone who has never shipped a damn thing in their life shows up to explain in detail why it won’t work.
I’ve been in all of these situations, some of them in the same week. And the thing I’ve had to learn, slowly and sometimes badly, is that none of it is actually about your work.