How To Handle Negative Feedback

Through 20 simple steps.

Yesterday, for the first time in my life, I got a real, bonafide hate comment on a TikTok that I created. The comment, made by a man with a blank profile, basically said that I was not funny and, perhaps even worse, that the content was ‘cringey’.

I know that there are a million expressions about not letting the haters ‘get you down’, but sometimes that’s a lot easier said than done! I’ve been doing a lot of thinking since receiving this hate comment, and I’ve created a plan on how to deal with it.

Below I have detailed a step-by-step guide on how to overcome negative feedback. I hope that this helps any of you who are struggling with something similar.

---

How To Handle Negative Feedback

Step 1: Feel sad— it’s natural to be upset when someone insults you or your work.

Step 2: Give up.

Step 3: Become unrecognizable. Dye your hair, get plastic surgery, and use acid to melt off your fingerprints.

Step 4: Move off the grid… maybe go to one of the seldom contacted tribes in the Amazon rainforest. 

Step 5: Learn the language and integrate yourself into the culture. 

Step 6: Marry into a prominent family and get a job hunting and gathering for your new tribe.

Step 7: Finally relax.

Step 8: You can’t seem to shake the hate comment that you got. You stay up all night in your hut thinking about the stranger’s remark. You can’t make love to your Amazonian wife, Bushika, without hearing your hater’s comment echo over and over inside of your head.

Step 9: You’re starting to have second thoughts about your new life in the Amazon and you need advice from somebody outside of your tribe that you can trust.

Step 10: While you’re out for a walk, a missionary arrives on the shores of your island and you strangle him to death. You take his cell phone and try to think of any phone number that you can remember.

Step 11: You’ve been away from the outside world for so long. You hold the iPhone 22 in your hands. The only phone number that you can remember is your mother’s. You call her and tell her how you’re feeling. She tells you to come home.

Step 12: You plan to leave in the early morning, before the sun has risen, so as not to stir your wife and tribe. 

Step 13: Oh shit. Your amazonian wife is going into labor. You had no idea that Bushika was even pregnant. You’ve only been here for 6 months; it can’t be your baby.

 Step 14: When the village midwives arrive, you sneak out of your hut and row the dead missionary’s boat, which you’ve hidden on the beach beneath a few layers of palm fronds, to the nearest city. 

Step 15: You catch a flight back to the United States, infecting everyone on the plane with various Amazonian viruses previously thought to be completely eradicated worldwide.

Step 16: You start taking vocational classes on Computer Science at a local library.

Step 17: Using your new skills, you track the IP address linked to your hater’s TikTok account. You find out his real address and take a flight to Columbus, Ohio, where he lives.

Step 18: You show up at his house and ask him if he recognizes you. He says that he doesn’t. It’s probably because of all of the plastic surgery and tribal tattoos.

Step 19: You explain who you are and you let him know that, after much deliberation, you’ve decided to forgive him for what he’s done to you. After the conversation ends, you go home.

Step 20: Every once in a while you catch yourself thinking of Bushika, or her new baby, or even the missionary, but you never catch yourself thinking of the hater. You are healed. Finally, you can relax.