The first forty-eight hours
Most people who call me for the first time sound the same. I don't mean that unkindly. It's just a particular tone you start to recognise, someone who hasn't slept properly, has checked their phone a few hundred times that morning, and has half-seriously wondered whether it would be easier to just go and live abroad for a while.
I understand the impulse. I'm not sure I'd handle it any better if it were me.
What I've come to believe, after enough of these calls, is that the forty-eight hours after something breaks are genuinely the hardest part of a crisis to navigate well. Not because people are doing anything wrong, exactly, but because almost every instinct you have in that window is pulling you in the wrong direction. Explain. Defend. Post. Correct. Reply. Forward the screenshots to the group chat. All of it feels urgent, and almost all of it tends to make things harder later.
I've done versions of this myself in much smaller ways, misread an email, stayed up drafting a reply I shouldn't have sent, convinced myself at 1am that something needed addressing immediately. I think most people have. The difference in a public crisis is just the scale, and the fact that your 1am decisions get preserved on Google for a long time afterwards.
The first thing a lot of people do is read the replies. All of them. I've spoken to people who've scrolled for six hours straight, screenshotting the worst ones, reading them out loud to their partner. I don't think it helps, and I say that gently because I suspect I'd do the same thing. It feels like research. It feels like you're gathering information you need. But the algorithm reads that engagement as interest and keeps the thing going, and the brain reads it as threat and stops being able to think clearly. It's a bad combination.
The second thing people often do is write a statement. Usually late at night. Usually on their phone. Typed, deleted, typed again, shown to three friends, an emoji added, an emoji removed, and then posted in a slightly worse version than the one from two hours earlier. I've read a lot of these drafts over the years, including ones I've helped write and later wished we'd slept on. It's very easy, in that state, to mistake the relief of having done something for the feeling of having done the right thing.
One thing I've noticed, and I offer this tentatively because crises vary enormously, is that in the first forty-eight hours the story often isn't really about the person at the centre of it yet. It's about a feeling people have, about the world, about something that annoyed them that morning, about an argument they've been having in their head for months. The name attached is almost incidental. If you speak too early, you give that feeling a face, and the face tends to become the story. If you can wait, the feeling often moves on, because feelings do, and the internet finds someone else.
That's not a rule. It's a pattern I've seen often enough to take seriously. There are absolutely situations where silence reads as guilt, or where a quick clear statement is genuinely the right move, and I've got it wrong myself on the timing before. The honest answer is that it's hard to tell from the inside which situation you're in, because from the inside every crisis feels like the worst one anyone has ever had. At 3am they all feel equally catastrophic. They usually aren't, but that's very cold comfort at 3am.
The people I've seen come through these things best tend to do quite boring things in the first two days. They close the apps. They talk to someone who isn't emotionally involved. They write down what actually happened, properly, including the parts that don't flatter them, so they're working from facts rather than memory. They don't post a cryptic story. They don't like a vague tweet about resilience. They sit with it, which I know is an incredibly annoying thing to be told when you're in the middle of it.
The ones who struggle most are often the ones who decide, somewhere around hour four, that they're going to handle it themselves. Usually from a good place, they want to set the record straight, they don't want to seem like they're hiding. So they go on a podcast, or write a long post, or reply to a journalist's DM in the spirit of being transparent. By the time I hear from them, the original story has picked up two or three follow-ups, and the follow-ups are harder to deal with because they're things that actually happened, on the record, in writing.
I really don't say any of this to be harsh about it. Most of the people I end up speaking to aren't bad people who've done something terrible. They're people who are frightened, and frightened people make choices they wouldn't otherwise make, and those choices get indexed and stay there. The system isn't particularly fair, and I wouldn't pretend I've worked out how to make it fair. But there's usually something that can be done in that first window to stop it getting worse, and most of it involves doing less rather than more, which is the part that's genuinely hard to accept.
If you're reading this in the middle of one of these moments, the thing I'd probably say on a first call is that it feels like the world is ending and almost certainly isn't. Most of the people you're worried about, journalists, strangers, friends who haven't texted, will be thinking about something else by next week. The internet's attention span for everyone except the person in the middle of it is quite short. The person in the middle is the one who shouldn't be making big decisions right now, and that's usually you.
Put the phone down. Drink some water. The statement can wait until morning. And if it can't, it's probably worth talking to someone before you send it.