A place where everybody knows your name sounds like a nightmare to a canceled person. The crux of the whole thing is that everybody does know your name, your face, and the worst tags and epithets the mob du jour can attach to them. Or at least it feels that way, usually for years after. For the first few months, canceled people rarely leave the house. Part of this is the initial response to the threat and trauma. Forget fight or flight. “Everybody freezes,” Michael Capiraso told me early on. That statement was based on his own experience, but most conversations he and I have had with other canceled people since then bear it out.
The other part is simply fear. Canceled people aren’t usually afraid of being attacked or accosted if they are spotted in public. The fear is simply of being seen and recognized.
That’s the essence of public humiliation: your identity is your greatest liability. The whole world has already decided you’re the worst person ever. Just because they’ve moved on to their next target and forgotten about you (“I have moved on,” he said. “I don’t want to get back involved in it.”), doesn’t mean your slate is clean. Even if you don’t internalize the humiliation and convert it to shame and guilt, you still don’t want to be seen. You don’t want to be recognized. You don’t want to be.
Fear layered on top of freezing secures the win for the mob. Whether the target leaves the country or never leaves their house without their spin on Unabomber chic, they have been purged from their communities.
After some combination of time and treatment, the freeze thaws and the fear fades enough that they start venturing out more often, going a bit further, and not activating incognito mode. It’s almost inevitable that at some point they’ll encounter someone who recognizes them from Before.
At the end of our presentation at the Niagara Conference on Workplace Mobbing, Dr. Christine Marie noted that it had been the first time Michael Capiraso and Dave Scott-Thomas spoke publicly and in-person about their cancelations. That didn’t fully land for me at the time. The significance really hit when each of them told me about being recognized just a few weeks on either side of the conference. These two interactions are at opposite poles, and say so much about first conversations with the canceled.
Small-town America, aka, Manhattan
Capiraso spent most of 2020–23 bunkered in his apartment. If he left, he would usually only venture a few blocks west to the coffee shop where he’d meet his few stalwart friends, or the oddly curious and persistent writer passing through town.
He practically had to be dragged to go east: east took you to Central Park, 843 acres of post-cancelation triggers, flashbacks, and well-founded fear of being recognized.
The Park wasn’t Capiraso’s “third place” or a home away from home. As the center of New York City’s running community, it was an extension of his home, an expression of his life. He logged dozens of miles each month commuting through it, and closer to a hundred miles each month running its trails. It’s where he took his daughters to the playgrounds over almost every day after school, held business meetings (often while logging some of those miles), had work events.
Not everyone, but many people there did know his name. No fence or wall could have more effectively kept him away.
Central Park wasn’t as much of a no-go zone for the latter three years of his cancelation, but it still offered more tension than enjoyment. He had a few encounters with people he knew from New York Road Runners in the Park, and those didn’t exactly encourage him to spend more time there. West was still best.
After six years of cancelation, in August, all of those fears were validated—ironically, not in the Park. Michael was walking down Columbus Avenue in New York City when some guy approached him and said, “Hey, you used to be in charge at New York Road Runners, right?”
Michael didn’t freeze, but he definitely pulled up short and tensed.
“I just noticed your face as you were walking by. I remember people,” the stranger said. His daughter used to compete in youth running events at the New York City Armory, and he recognized Capiraso from those. “I knew you from all of your years there. I really admired what you did.”
“I didn’t have such a good exit,” Capiraso said, testing the waters a bit, as well as this rando’s knowledge of the NYC running scene.
“Yeah, I know. I’m sorry about that,” the other guy said.
After a short conversation, they exchanged contact information, and a few days later went for a run.
“You can’t make this up,” Capiraso accurately recounted. “And now I have a new friend, it seems.”
More pages from the Playbook
That’s one extreme: complete stranger, positive interaction, pleasant IRL follow-up.
Strangers carry the threat of the unknown: “What might they say?” That’s a much different question than the one that hangs over the first post-cancelation interaction with someone you knew Before. That question is: What could they say? What could they possibly say to excuse or justify joining up with the mob, or silently standing by while the mob did its thing?
Dave Scott-Thomas, as he usually does, figured out the pattern in these interactions, which led to him crafting a rule.
The first interaction is always going to be about you, the participant or bystander. That conversation is your chance to express how sorry you are for what the canceled person went through, how rough it must have been for them, and maybe offer up why you would have said something but didn’t because you couldn’t because reasons.
Dave will let you have your moment. He won’t give you anything to make you feel better, or assuage your guilt. He’s not going to be an accomplice in anyone’s self-soothing. He’ll just sit there and listen and let you go on your way.
The test is the second conversation, assuming there is one. If you were genuinely trying to make amends and want the door open for some ongoing relationship, the second conversation will be about the canceled person. But if you’re just trying to convince yourself that they are OK, and therefore you are free of any guilt or responsibility, then the second conversation will rehash the first and will be about you.
Canceled people often disappear in plain sight, which, again, is kind of the point.
With the exception of the few people who really did him in, actively or passively, he’s almost universally willing to put the past behind, provided it stays there. Every interaction can’t be an occasion for guilt, penitence, or self-gratification. After all the negativity, you need to bring something positive to his future if he’s going to bring something to yours. That’s not transactional. It’s being real.
Seven years post-cancelation, he had a chance to give this rule the ultimate real world stress test.
Small-town (actually) Canada
“Same address, same phone number, same Gmail.”
If you knew Dave Scott-Thomas pre-cancelation, you knew what you needed to know to check in with him or see how he was doing post-cancelation.
If you tried to get information from someone in his family, or asked someone that you knew stayed in touch with him for an update, they would direct you to your own contact list: same address, same phone number, same Gmail. The people who stayed close to Dave are not interested in making things easy for the people who didn’t. If you felt guilty or ashamed, if you were afraid of what he might say or what you might hear, well that’s on you. If you were looking for an “Oh, he’s fine” so you could palliate your conscience, they weren’t supplying the hit.
Like Michael and Central Park, there was little physical distance between Dave’s house and the university he worked at.
Quick aside: very few canceled people I talk to move. There are lots of reasons for this: if you’re too frozen with depression to leave your house, house hunting and the logistics of moving are not in the cards. There is also the financial toll of being canceled in lawyers, mental health, loss of job, and the rest. And it’s not like Google results won’t follow you to a new town and pop up whenever people look up their new neighbors. But even so, I and I suspect a lot of normies would expect that getting out of there would be a high priority.
Instead, canceled people often disappear in plain sight, which, again, is kind of the point.
Many people there did know his name. No fence or wall could have more effectively kept him away.
But despite being right where he’d always been in a small college town, Dave somehow went seven years without encountering one of the people whose fearful complicity as the mob went about its work secured a place amongst the frozen heads of the ninth circle. We’ll call him Ben.
“I was coming back to my car after playing with Chewie”—a very large, very gentle Rottweiler—“at some local rec fields and heard ‘Hi, Dave.’ Ben was waiting in his car, saw me approaching, and got out. I was caught off guard and I didn’t recognize him at first. He said, ‘It’s been a long time. It’s really good to see you,’ and held out his hand. We shook. He said, ‘It’s really good to see you’ again. I said ‘OK,’ and got in my car.”
Dave described this to wife and two close friends, who all know Ben and—because they’ve been with Dave this whole time—know The Playbook. They agreed that Ben “rehearsed that meeting dozens of times in his head, and that first one is about him, not me. Ben goes home thinking there’s some resolution and that it’s fine if he sees you about town now. I go home revisiting all the betrayal with no forward motion.”
Dave then told it to a group of friends who have mostly coalesced post-cancelation, so they don’t know Ben and don’t know the extent of the betrayal.
Their reaction was less nuanced.
“Fuck that guy. You shook his hand?”
One of them asked Dave, “How did you feel in the moment?”
“Part of me wanted to hug Ben and part of me wanted to punch him in the face.”
“That just tells you how complicated it all is.”
Fear, then loathing
Three years ago, I was the guy who approached Michael Capiraso out of nowhere and said “Hey, you used to run the New York Road Runners. Can I ask you a few questions?” I was also the guy who popped up in Dave’s inbox saying, “Remember me from back in the day? Last time we talked was 2017…” I had no idea what I was walking into, and none of us could have foreseen any of the three years since. But at those moments of first contact, first conversation, and then follow-up emails and calls, I was part of a process: attenuating the fear of strangers, and establishing the pattern of familiars.
Time and treatment help reframe the original breaches and betrayals. As the canceled person’s understanding changes, so does their reaction to seeing someone from the past evade them—or, more precisely, evade their own conscience—now.
Fear and shame give way to dismay. The canceled person is not so much hurt as surprised, not in a passive-aggressive “My only mistake was thinking better of you” kind of way, but in a baffled, “Are you kidding me?” kind of way. From there it’s a very short step to bilious and justified contempt.
Whereas before the target would think “I’m as low as they all say,” now they say “I spent years hiding in fear. But that person is the coward.”
Photo credit: Tyler Merbler / Flickr, under CC BY 2.0.
Really enjoyed reading this piece George and have watched Dave’s evolution and journey forward and it’s a testament to his strength and stamina. Really appreciate you shining a light on cancelations and the impact it has on people.