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I Was Cancelled in 2016. Then My Career Took Off.
I once had a Sports Illustrated byline. On the morning of July 8, 2016, I wrote tweets that ended my nine-year sportswriting career. Over six years later, I’m finally ready to address it all.
It was not even 10 a.m. After a late night of playing music at a downtown Austin dive bar, I was hungover as all hell, and not even halfway through my day’s first medium coffee.
I remember IM’ing the head of social media for the global tech conglomerate that had signed my checks for the four years up until then. If you need to know which global tech conglomerate, I suppose I can tell you it was Dell. That company was always beyond good to me, and I’m pretty sure that I was more than good enough for them — at least, other than that one time, I feel like always gave them my absolute best. I IM’d:
“So, ummmmm … just as a heads up …”
At the time, I was decent friends with the person I reached out to. By the end of my tenure at the company, I’d become friends with just about everyone in any kind of marketing or comms leadership capacity—but I probably wouldn’t have said anything had I not also run a corporate Twitter account. She wrote back:
